Which command would you use to display the contents of a text file in the terminal?

Using the command cat is the most straightforward way to display the contents of a text file directly in the terminal. The cat command, short for "concatenate," reads the specified file(s) and outputs their contents to the standard output, which is typically your terminal. This command is particularly useful for quickly viewing the content of files without any additional formatting.

In contrast, the other options do not serve this primary function effectively. For instance, echo is designed to display a line of text or variables provided to it, but it's not used to read the contents of a file. The command print does not exist in standard Linux command-line interface as a command to read files, and similarly, show is not a recognition command for this purpose in Linux. Thus, cat emerges as the appropriate choice for displaying file contents.