To display the content of a file, we will use the cat command. The cat command displays the whole file content on stdout. However, sometimes, we are interested in viewing only a few lines of a file. In this case, using cat will be tedious because we will have to scroll down to particular lines that we are interested in.

Shell provides us the head and tail commands to print only the lines in which we are interested in. The main difference between both the commands is, head prints the lines from the beginning of the files, and tail prints the lines from the end of the files.