tool (From "catenate")
Unix's command which copies one or
more entire files to the screen or some other output sink
without pause.
Among
Unix fans, cat is considered an excellent example of
user-interface design, because it delivers the file contents
without such verbosity as spacing or headers between the files
(the
pr command can be used to do this), and because it does
not require the files to consist of lines of text, but works
with any sort of data.
Among Unix haters, cat is considered the
canonical example
of *bad* user-interface design, because of its woefully
unobvious name. It is far more often used to
blast a file
to standard output than to concatenate files. The name "cat"
for the former operation is just as unintuitive as, say,
(1994-11-29)