One of the great things about cat is that you can view the contents of a file with line numbers. You do so using the -n option, as follows: cat -n ~/Desktop/myFile Sometimes a file is too big to view though, so you can pipe the output to less, to combine some of the best features of each: cat -n ~/Desktop/myFile | less Obviously, the same thing would work with more: cat -n ~/Desktop/myFile | less You can also do something similar with the grep command and the -n option: grep -n ^ ~/Desktop/myFile | less Enjoy.