The disadvantage of using the cat command to display a very large text file is that text files can be too large to be displayed. Thankfully, there's an easy solution to this problem. Use the command less instead of cat. less will paginate the file you're trying to read, allowing you to read one page's worth at a time (a page is defined by however big your terminal is). Furthermore, you can always quit at anytime by pressing q, and your terminal isn't locked up. If less isn't available for some reason, an older utility called more also serves a similar function.