Birmingham mumbai

[
 112 
]
There's no output, since again, the file is empty. So, let's instead take a look at a more 
practical example. Here's a file we can use 
cat
 against that actually does have content 
inside:
cat /etc/os-release
The output of this command is as follows:
Figure 4.6: Viewing the contents of /etc/os-release
The 
/etc/os-release
 file is one that exists on many distributions. It's a special file 
that gives you some information about the distribution that's currently installed. If 
you were to connect to a Linux server and wanted to know which distribution it was 
running, viewing the contents of this file is one way to find out. You can also view 
some of the same info in abbreviated form via the following command:
lsb_release -a
That command also works on various distributions, but I prefer the 
/etc/os-release
 
file because it contains more information. Regardless, the entire point of this exercise 
is to demonstrate that the 
cat
 command allows you to view the contents of a file. 
More or less, there are other commands that also let you do the same thing. And I 
mean that literally—you can also try viewing the contents of 
/etc/os-release
 with 
more
 or 
less
:
more /etc/os-release
less /etc/os-release
The 
more
 command allows you to more easily view larger files, so the benefit won't 
be as immediately apparent with a file as short as 
/etc/os-release
. If you use 
more
 
to view a longer file, it will stop the output when it fills the screen, and allow you to 
press 
Enter
 to advance to the next line.

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Chapter 4