Actually, you are wrong. In the 1972 2nd version of Bell Labs Unix the cat source code says "cat -- concatinate files"(sic). And, in the Bell Labs "Unix Programmers Manual", Second Edition, 1972 it is "Concatenate (or print) files".
There goes those them "elitists" trying to be accurate again... And where do you get the idea what it's "supposed" to be anything? Approachable, or not approachable, it is what its founders made it; not what you decide it should be. Talk about arrogance.
Cat seems fine to me, since for most usages the con- is not necessary, and is redundant. Which makes it unfortunate that concatenate is the de-facto standard term, over catenate.
You're probably right but English, as well as UNIX, has conventions which are widely used. Going against them requires a lot of work and I'm not sure that the benefits are worth it.
"concatenate" is a lot more known than "catenate". And I'm pretty sure that even "concatenate" is quite low in usage compared to a more common verb (or set of verbs) which could be used to describe what cat does ("show", "join", "merge", "unify", etc).
Anyway, I was mostly ranting since at this point both "concatenate" as a de-facto standard term and "cat" as a default UNIX tool will probably outlive me and most likely my descendants as well :)
