It's most definitely catenate. I understand catenate to mean chain and concatenate to be to chain together. Since "cat foo bar xyzzy" doesn't modify the files to join them in any way I don't think they're chained together.
Besides, ken & Co. aren't daft. con would be short for concatenate. :-)
Re:Unix Commands I Abuse Every Day
by EchoAbstract on Thursday September 06, 2012 @12:10PM
(#4484788)
According to the 1st Edition and 6th Edition manual pages:
NAME cat -- concatenate and print
See: http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/cat http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/cat
I'm pretty sure based on the timeline of pipe (~1973, roughly V4) that the cat command (~1971 V1) predates pipes.
Fortunately they fixed that errant man page. :-)
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/cat
From the man page
cat doc1 doc2 > doc.all
concatenates the files doc1 and doc2 and writes the result to doc.all
I think I'm missing your point. doc[12] aren't changed.
Do they mean the same thing?
As for cat, the utility, I'm afraid we'll never stop seeing people doing
even when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.If it did, I might as well do
I mean, why not? It "looks nicer" than Programmers love their cats.