Displaying file names with contents when using the "cat" command

Question

Is there a command to show the directory or file name when using cat to display the contents of files?

For example: assume two files f1.txt and f2.txt are in ./tmp

./tmp/f1.txt
./tmp/f2.txt 

Then when I do cat ./tmp/*.txt, only the content of the files will be shown. But how to first show the file name, then the content? e.g.:

 (The needed command):
 ./tmp/f1.txt:  
 This is from f1.txt
 and so on
 ./tmp/f2.txt:
 This is from f2.txt ...

Is there a command to do it? (There seems to be no option for cat to show the file names.)

Answer 1

Just as another idea, try tail -n +1 ./tmp/*.txt

==> ./tmp/file1.txt <==
<contents of file1.txt>

==> ./tmp/file2.txt <==
<contents of file2.txt>

==> ./tmp/file3.txt <==
<contents of file3.txt>

Answer 2

$ for file in ./tmp/*.txt; do printf '%s\n' "$file";  cat "$file"; done

-or-

$ find ./tmp -maxdepth 1 -name "*.txt" -print -exec cat "{}" \;

Answer 3

Not exactly what you asked for, but you can prefix each line with the filename:

$ grep '^' ./tmp/*.txt
./tmp/f1.txt: this is from f1.txt
./tmp/f1.txt: blaa, blaa, blaa...
./tmp/f1.txt: blaa, blaa, blaa...
./tmp/f2.txt: this is from f2.txt
./tmp/f2.txt: blaa, blaa, blaa...
./tmp/f2.txt: blaa, blaa, blaa...

It will be tough to do much better than this without resorting to a little scripting.

Answer 4

Not enough reputation point to add a comment to second answer

tail -v -n +1 /tmp/*.txt

will display filename even if there is only one file.

Answer 5

You could easily write a tiny script doing just that,

for f; 
do 
  echo "This is from $f";
  cat -- "$f";
done

Answer 6

grep . *.txt 

Matches all lines and also shows file names

Answer 7

find . -name '*' -execdir cat '{}' \;

When a directory is passed to cat, you'll see something like:

cat: ./chapter_01: Is a directory

Immediately following, the find will cat the contents of that directory.

Answer 8

More gives nice headings, poor cat though:

$ more *.txt | cat
::::::::::::::
file1.txt
::::::::::::::
line1
line2

::::::::::::::
file2.txt
::::::::::::::
line1
line2
line3

...and so on.

Answer 9

cat is (intentionally) an extremely simple command that just reads one file stream and dumps it to another (with a few basic formatting options). It'd be fairly easy to create a utility based on cat that did provide the filename, but standard versions won't do this -- probably because it's easy to replicate with other commands.

If you want to examine the pages manually you could use 'less'. This will give you the filename at the end of every file, in the format: 'foo.txt (file 1 of 100) (END) - Next: bar.txt).