So, the other day I was messing around with my Linux machine, and I stumbled upon this neat little trick using pipes, cat, and a command I creatively named “zzz”. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but I thought it was kinda cool and worth sharing, you know, for those random moments when you need it.
The Setup
First things first, I needed something to, well, “cat” out. Usually, I’d just grab some random text file, I find a file named `my_long_text_*` in my `Documents` directory. It’s just a huge wall of text, perfect for what I had in mind.
Building the “zzz” Command
The “zzz” part isn’t a real command, of *’s a simple shell script with one line. I just wanted a way to pause output for a bit. So, I opened up my terminal and typed:
nano zzz
And inside the `zzz` file I put this single line:
sleep 1
Then i saved it and made the script executable with:
chmod +x zzz
Putting it All Together
Okay, here’s where the “magic” happens. I went back to my `Documents` directory and typed the following command in the terminal:
cat my_long_text_* while read line; do echo $line; ./zzz; done- cat my_long_text_*: This part, you probably know, just dumps the entire contents of `my_long_text_*` to the standard output. It’s like opening the floodgates of text.
- (the pipe): This is the hero of our story. It takes that massive text output from cat and sends it, not directly to the screen, but as input to the next part. Think of it as a conveyor belt.
- while read line; do … done: This is a basic loop in shell * is going to read the output from `cat` line by line.
- echo $line: show the contents of each line.
- ./zzz: call my custom `zzz` command, it is only command is `sleep 1`,it pauses everything for one second.
I hit Enter, and boom! Instead of the text file just blasting onto my screen in a blur, it printed one line at a time, with a one-second pause between each * reading a really slow teleprompter.
It’s not exactly rocket science, I just find a way to print every line in a very long file with a small pause, but it’s a fun little example of how you can combine basic Linux tools to do something a little * means, you can combine anything in Linux. Hope you find it some how useful.
