.\" Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California.
.\" All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement
.\" specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
.\" @(#)cat.1 5.1 (Berkeley) %G%
.TH CAT 1 "18 January 1983"
cat \- catenate and print
in sequence and displays it on the standard output. Thus
displays the file on the standard output, and
concatenates the first two files and places the result on the third.
If no input file is given, or if the argument `\-' is encountered,
reads from the standard input file.
Output is buffered in 1024-byte blocks unless the standard
output is a terminal, in which case it is line buffered. The
option makes the output completely unbuffered.
option displays the output lines preceded by lines numbers, numbered
sequentially from 1. Specifying the
option omits the line numbers from blank lines.
option crushes out multiple adjacent empty lines so that the
output is displayed single spaced.
option displays non-printing characters so that they are visible.
Control characters print like ^X for control-x; the delete character
(octal 0177) prints as ^?.
Non-ascii characters (with the high bit set) are printed as M-
(for meta) followed by the character of the low 7 bits. A
option may be given with the
option, which displays a `$' character at the end of each line.
option displays tab characters as ^I.
cp(1), ex(1), more(1), pr(1), tail(1)
Beware of `cat a b >a' and `cat a b >b', which destroy
the input files before reading them.