Use the cat command to view object content - Object Storage Service

Prints the content of an object in a bucket to stdout.

Important

Use this command for text objects (such as TXT files). Binary objects produce unreadable output.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure that you have:

The oss:GetObject permission on the target object. For details, see Attach a custom policy to a RAM user
ossutil installed. For ossutil 1.6.16 and later, use ossutil directly as the binary name. For earlier versions, update the binary name based on your operating system. For details, see ossutil command reference

Command syntax

ossutil cat oss://bucketname/objectname [--payer <value>] [--version-id <value>]

Parameter	Description
`bucketname`	The bucket name.
`objectname`	The object name.
`--payer`	The request payer. Set to `requester` to charge traffic and request fees to the requester instead of the bucket owner.
`--version-id`	The version ID of the object. Applies only to versioning-enabled or versioning-suspended buckets.

Examples

Example 1: View object content (bucket without versioning)

ossutil cat oss://examplebucket/test.txt

Output:

My Website Home Page.

0.088092(s) elapsed

Example 2: View a specific version of an object

To view a specific version of an object, pass the version ID with --version-id. To list all versions of an object, see ls.

ossutil cat oss://examplebucket/exampleobject.txt --version-id CAEQARiBgID8rumR2hYiIGUyOTAyZGY2MzU5MjQ5ZjlhYzQzZjNlYTAyZDE3****

Output:

Hello World.

0.044820(s) elapsed

Example 3: View object content across accounts or regions

To access a bucket in a different region, add -e to specify the endpoint. To access a bucket owned by a different Alibaba Cloud account, add -i for the AccessKey ID and -k for the AccessKey secret.

ossutil cat oss://examplebucket1/exampleobject1.txt -e oss-cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com -i yourAccessKeyID -k yourAccessKeySecret

Common options

Option	Description
`-e`	Endpoint of the target region (e.g., `oss-cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com`)
`-i`	AccessKey ID of the target Alibaba Cloud account
`-k`	AccessKey secret of the target Alibaba Cloud account

For the full list of common options, see Common options.