.\" Copyright (c) 1989 The Regents of the University of California. .\" All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted .\" provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are .\" duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation, .\" advertising materials, and other materials related to such .\" distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed .\" by the University of California, Berkeley. The name of the .\" University may not be used to endorse or promote products derived .\" from this software without specific prior written permission. .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED .\" WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. .\" .\" @(#)cat.1 6.4 (Berkeley) %G% .\" .TH CAT 1 "" .UC 1 .SH NAME cat \- concatenate and print files .SH SYNOPSIS .nf cat [-u] [-] [file ...] .SH DESCRIPTION The .I cat utility reads files sequentially, writing them to the standard output. The .I file operands are processed in command line order. A single dash represents standard input. .PP The .B \-u option guarantees that the output is unbuffered. .PP The command ``cat file1 file2 > file3'' concatenates the contents of file1 and file2 and places the result in file3. .PP Because of the shell language mechanism used to perform output redirection, the command ``cat file1 file 2 > file1'' will cause the original data in file1 to be destroyed! .SH "SEE ALSO" head(1), more(1), pr(1), tail(1) .br Rob Pike, ``UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful'' USENIX Summer Conference Proceedings, 1983.