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I've sometimes heard it's "catenate" not "concatenate".

Do they mean the same thing?

As for cat, the utility, I'm afraid we'll never stop seeing people doing

   cat file|prog1|prog2
even when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If it did, I might as well do

   cat file|cat|prog|cat|prog2|cat -
I mean, why not? It "looks nicer" than

   prog file|prog2 or 
   prog < file|prog2
Programmers love their cats.


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. :-)


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.


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


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


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


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




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