Unix Commands I Abuse Every Day

Re:Unix Commands I Abuse Every Day by ralph on Thursday September 06, 2012 @05:34AM (#4483460)

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. :-)

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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.

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Re:Unix Commands I Abuse Every Day by ralph on Thursday September 06, 2012 @02:40PM (#4485543)

Fortunately they fixed that errant man page. :-) http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/cat

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Re:Unix Commands I Abuse Every Day by ishkur101 on Thursday September 06, 2012 @07:46AM (#4483722)

From the man page cat doc1 doc2 > doc.all concatenates the files doc1 and doc2 and writes the result to doc.all

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Re:Unix Commands I Abuse Every Day by ralph on Thursday September 06, 2012 @08:18AM (#4483795)

I think I'm missing your point. doc[12] aren't changed.

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Re:Unix Commands I Abuse Every Day by ishkur101 on Thursday September 06, 2012 @08:47AM (#4483889)

Doc 1 & 2 are not changed but chained together to create doc.all

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