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cat a bunch of small files with file indication

Terminal - cat a bunch of small files with file indication
grep . *
2011-09-01 09:16:04
User: theist
Functions: grep
18
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cat a bunch of small files with file indication

If you have a bunch of small files that you want to cat to read, you can cat each alone (boring); do a cat *, and you won't see what line is for what file, or do a grep . *. "." will match any string and grep in multifile mode will place a $filename: before each matched line. It works recursively too!!

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

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What others think

Unfortunately '.' doesn't match empty lines. '^' does match everything

Comment by unixmonkey8119 89 weeks and 4 days ago

This is a good idea. The empty lines thing occurred to me too, but in the cases I'm thinking of you probably aren't interested in the empty lines anyway. If there happens to be only one file in the dir, you don't get the filename, so you probably won't want to use this technique in a script, but it's handy for just typing in.

Comment by splante 89 weeks and 3 days ago

this is a kind of command-line trick I use to read splitted config files. so no I'm not interested on blanks and it is not intended for scripting :) . But I like the "including blank lines" variant, because looks geekier when I type it on the console :D

Comment by theist 89 weeks ago

The "grep . *" command is super-cool but guys the "grep ^ *" is pure awesomeness! thanks to both of you men @theist @unixmonkey8119

Comment by ztank1013 84 weeks and 4 days ago

Your point of view

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