.\" Copyright (c) 1989, 1990 The Regents of the University of California.
.\" This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by
.\" the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
.\" %sccs.include.redist.man%
.\" @(#)cat.1 6.16 (Berkeley) %G%
.Nd concatenate and print files
utility reads files sequentially, writing them to the standard output.
operands are processed in command line order.
A single dash represents standard input.
The options are as follows:
option but doesn't number blank lines.
option, and displays a dollar sign
Squeeze multiple adjacent empty lines, causing the output to be
option, and displays tab characters as
option guarantees that the output is unbuffered.
Displays non-printing characters so they are visible.
Control characters print line
for control-X; the delete
character (octal 0177) prints as
Non-ascii characters (with the high bit set) are printed as
(for meta) followed by the character for the low 7 bits.
utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
Because of the shell language mechanism used to perform output
.Dq Li cat file1 file 2 > file1
will cause the original data in file1 to be destroyed!
.%T "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful"
.%J "USENIX Summer Conference Proceedings"
command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.