You can use several options to streamline the viewing of large text files, such as /var/log/messages. Some of these options are described in the article below.
# head
The head command will print the first 10 lines of a file to the screen. This can be coupled with the options "-n " to display a larger number of lines. So for instance,
# head -n 40
would display the top 40 lines of a text file.
# tail
Much like #head, the tail command will display the last 10 lines of a text file. This can also be coupled with the option "-n " to display a larger number of lines. "-f",output appended data as the file grows.
tail -f /path/to/log for example tail -f /var/cron/log shows the cron log file.
# cat
Cat will print the entire contents of a file to the screen.
You can also add a '| grep' to the end of any of these commands to search for a specific word. For instance,
# cat testing.txt | grep error
would only report the lines containing the word 'error'. Note that this is case-sensitive.
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