How to download and examine a file on the command line

How to download a file on the command line

You have many choices but two popular ones are curl and wget.

Example with curl:

$ curl <url> --output <output_file_name>

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonbcard/scrabble-bot/master/src/dictionary.txt --output dictionary.txt

Now you have a file at your current directory!

How to examine a file on the command line

Get the permissions and size of the file (ls -lh)

$ ls -lh dictionary.txt

Look through the file. (less)

• Use j and k to navigate down and up.
• Use q to quit

$ less dictionary.txt

Find the number of rows in the file (wc -l)

$ wc -l dictionary.txt

Get the first and last 10 rows of the file (head, tail)

$ head dictionary.txt
$ tail dictionary.txt

# default number of lines is 10 but can be changed
$ head -5 dictionary.txt
$ tail -7 dictionary.txt

Print every 10000 lines (sed)

$ sed -n '0~10000p' dictionary.txt

Search the file for text (cat, grep)

$ cat dictionary.txt| grep STAPEDE