cat Command
 

I am working for a corporation in Washington. We have a bunch of mahcines that are using LINUX as their operating systems. This is my first exposure to the OS so I am still trying to figure it out. My question has to deal with the 'cat' command. We are trying to view a port that has a reciever on it and it is constantly recieving reads from a transmitter nearby. We are using the 'cat' command to view the port but this command times out after a certain amount of time. I was curious as to if there is a way to either extend the timeout period of the command, or if there is a different or more efficient command to use to look at the port. Any suggestions or insight is greatly appreciated by me.
Thanx

We use the 'tail -f' command to look at the logs created by our machines. We tried to use it to view the port but it does not work. I am pretty sure that the 'tail' command is pretty much strictly for text.

maybe you would get a better result from using "tail -f" i think. it will stay open permanently and output the end of the file as and when it changes for forever