Read

Updated: 05/26/2020 by Computer Hope
binary numbers in a tunnel

Read may refer to any of the following:

1. The term read describes how information is obtained 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's 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.

2. With a shell, read is a builtin command of the Bash shell. See our read command page for further information.

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