There are more ways to do read a file. If we have larger file more than 1000 lines, most of them use LESS rather than CAT. i have listed two ways of reading such big file. I just want to know which is efficient way, which consume less memory of my CPU.?

$ wc -l MyFile.txt
1568
$ cat MyFile.txt|less
$less MyFile.txt

In general if a command will do the open/read for you by itself it is less efficient to cat the file and pipe it to the command. The command is processing the data anyway.

You can see the difference yourself. Try doing:

time cat MyFile.txt

time (cat MyFile.txt|cat)

The latter should show more time used.

Also more memory would be used by doing the pipeline and cpu has to spawn another program. For tiny things this isn't an issue but if everything in your system operated that way it could cause you problems.

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cat is a concatenator. It's designed for taking multiple separate inputs and printing them all to stdout as a single unbroken stream. It's basically just a pipe from input to output. While it can be used to display a single file for reading, that's just a convenient side-effect. The system requirements are very low, and it exits immediately.

less is a pager, a text display application. It's designed to take a single input and break it up into pages that will fit the size of your display. You can then skip back and forth among them. This requires the program to stay active, holding the input text in memory, until you manually exit it.

And in general, two processes will consume more system resources than one.

The only real reason you'd want to use both cat and less together is if you wanted to combine several files into one and then read them as a single unit.

Hey thanks all great replies.

It seems like, less keeps entire file in memory and buffer(display) the part of file(few lines). while cat wont store the file, its just through what it have.

when cat followed by pipe with less seems to be efficient rather than using only less a file.

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