So close! you have to do cat < foo.txt :-) (/s)

Admittedly I still use cat for this.

This also works too, but it's more verbose:

echo "$(<foo.txt)"

It's mentioned in the Bash man pages:

The command substitution $(cat file) can be replaced by the equivalent but faster $(< file).

EDIT: I was just informed that simply <foo.txt works too.

If it's really long, I use less , because it breaks it up into navigable pages instead of filling your entire buffer. :)

Never knew about just using < though! Cool!

You can use less. There are also specialized ones for that purpose like bat.