How do I send a set of file paths to cat and display their contents?

Question

to be more specific ,I want to display contents of files from output of find command,I tried the following commands but they don't get my work done

cat < find . -name "*.txt"
find . -name "*.txt" | cat

steeldriver · Answer 1 · 2017-11-24T13:13:06.197

4

Either

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs cat --

or (better, if you have GNU find)

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 cat --

or

find . -name "*.txt" -exec cat -- {} +

edited Nov 24 '17 at 13:13

answered Nov 24 '17 at 03:35

steeldriver

81,074

1

+1; or cat $(find ...) – Videonauth Nov 24 '17 at 04:07
It might make sense to use cat -- to prevent unwanted file option matches. – Raphael Ahrens Nov 24 '17 at 09:34
@RaphaelAhrens thanks, good point - will edit – steeldriver Nov 24 '17 at 13:12
@RaphaelAhrens - how could that happen when all file names returned by find start with . ? – don_crissti Nov 24 '17 at 13:47
@Videonauth (and whoever upvoted your comment) - that will fail if filenames contain any IFS chars - see the answers here - newlines in file names exist only in theory but spaces are pretty common in real life... – don_crissti Nov 24 '17 at 13:51
@don_crissti fair point. But since the answer uses also xargs your second comment to @Videonauth applies. – Raphael Ahrens Nov 24 '17 at 16:15

score -1 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 24 '17 at 09:38

-1

You can use below the below command to display contents of files

Method 1:

find . -type f -iname "*.txt" -exec cat {} \;

Method 2:

ls -ltr *.txt | awk '{print "cat" " " $9}' | sh

edited Nov 24 '17 at 09:38

Zanna

3,571

answered Nov 24 '17 at 07:10

Praveen Kumar BS

5,211

1

The second method has some issues. First ls behaves very differently on different OSs. Second building shell scripts on the run is a little bit of over doing it. – Raphael Ahrens Nov 24 '17 at 09:37

How do I send a set of file paths to cat and display their contents?

2 Answers2