Read may refer to any of the following:

  1. The term read is a description of how information is obtaining from a drive or another storage device. For example, before this page was shown on your browser, it had to be read from our server hard drive and then downloaded.

When saving new information or changes, you write to the drive. If write protection is enabled or you lack the proper permissions, you may only have read-only capabilities, which means you can read information but not write or change anything.

If you lack read access or the drive is inaccessible, the information is not readable.

  1. When referring to a shell, read is a builtin command of the Bash shell. See our read command page for further information.
  • How to open, view, and edit the contents of a file on a computer.
  • Why do I get an ‘Open with’ window when opening a file?
  • How to open, create, edit, and view a file in Linux.
  • Computer file help and support.

Fetch, Hardware terms, Read error, Read-only, Readout, Write