Linux cli download text file

The above command creates three empty text files. The redirect symbol is quite time-saving if you just want to create a single text file. It gets quite longer than the touch command to create multiple empty text files.

Now, this method is also quite simple and easy to use. This method is a kind of combination of touch and the redirect symbol commands. This method is a bit quirky, so you only prefer using the above two commands if you want to create an empty never edited file. If you want to create and type in the text file straight away, by far this is quite a brilliant method.

This will save you time to open up an editor and the command is also quite easy. The below command creates an empty yet edited file as it prompts the user to create a text file and type in the file at the same time. So, this method is quite a time-saving method if you want to edit the text file very quickly. The following command will append the text to the pre-existing file. Using cat command to create the file.

This is also similar to cat command, but it is very flexible comparatively. The following command is usually used for printing text on the terminal, but we can also use it to write to a file or make an empty file. If you want to create multiple files at a time, you can chain up the command as in previous methods. We can also add functionality to the echo command to quickly create and write to the text file just like cat command.

The above command can be highly customizable as it uses the properties of the echo command to make it quite versatile to write the text in the file, but using a new line character every time can be annoying as well. Similar to the echo command, we have the printf command as well.

The print command does the same thing as the echo command but in a C style rather than shell-style editing. The print command does some pretty C-like things, such as the newline character and the variable names can be used as well, but that is not for a simple text file.

But still, the printf command can be useful in a lot of cases to edit files on the go. Using printf command to create files. Wget also allows users to download multiple files from different URLs. This can easily be done by the following command:. Once again, we can show this using an example. We will be downloading two HTML files from two different websites. For better understanding, please look at the image below:. Here filename refers to the name that you want to address the file as.

Using this, we can also change the type of the file. This is shown in the image below:. Wget also allows users to recursively download their files which is basically downloading all the files from the website under a single directory. For more information regarding Wget, users can input the following command into the terminal to get access to all the Wget commands that appear to be available:.

Curl is another command line tool that can be used to download files from the internet. Unlike Wget, which is command line only, features of Curl are powered by libcurl which is a cross-platform URL transfer library. Curl not only allows downloading of files but can also be used for uploading and exchanging of requests with servers. However, Curl does not support recursive downloads which Wget offers.

Similarly, like Wget, Curl comes pre-installed with most of the Linux Distributions. This can simply be checked by running the following command:. Just like Wget, Curl has multiple features incorporated inside of it. The most basic is its ability to allow users to download files from a single URL from the internet.

There are different tools and commands if you want to read binary files. Cat simply prints the content of the file to standard display i. It cannot be simpler than this, can it? Cat becomes a powerful command when used with its options. I recommend reading this detailed tutorial on using cat command. The problem with cat command is that it displays the text on the screen. Imagine if you use cat command with a file that has lines.

So, what do you do in such a case? Use less command in Linux explained later. The nl command is almost like the cat command. The only difference is that it prepends line numbers while displaying the text in the terminal. There are a few options with nl command that allows you to control the numbering. You can check its man page for more details. Less command views the file one page at a time. The best thing is that you exit less by pressing q , there are no lines displayed on the screen.

Your terminal remains clean and pristine. I strongly recommend learning a few options of the Less command so that you can use it more effectively. There is also more command which was used in olden days but less command has more friendly features. This is why you might come across the humorous term 'less is more'. Head command is another way of viewing text file but with a slight difference. The head command displays the first 10 lines of a text file by default.

You can change this behavior by using options with head command but the fundamental principle remains the same: head command starts operating from the head beginning of the file.