List all content of all files in the directory UNIX

Question

How to list all files-content in a directory?

something like ls -la | cat.

Answer 1

Use the following command, recursive :

find /path/to/folder -type f -exec cat {} \;

Non-recursive version (due to popular pression) :

find /path/to/folder -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec cat {} \;

Answer 2

The following command:

find ./ -type f -exec cat {} \;

would find only files (-type f) from the current folder (./).

Studer's answer is good, and excluding directories is a good idea because it is an undefined behavior between unices, read grawity's comment. Here are two known behaviors :

• cat on Linux will throw an error message when trying to cat a directory cat: ./folder: Is a directory).
• cat on FreeBSD will dump the raw directory, as stored on-disk.

If you need more information about the command or something more about it, please reply and I will annotate more/help you.

Edit: As John T pointed out, this command will go into every sub-directories. If you need only to cat files from the current directory, you would need -maxdepth 1, thus giving:

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec cat {} \;

The -maxdepth n option can also be used to limit it to an n amount of sub-directories, 1 being the current directory, 2 being the current directory and its direct descendants, and so on.