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cat: vt. [from catenate via
Unix
cat(1)] 1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other
output sink without pause (syn. blast). 2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an unprepared
target or with no intention of browsing it carefully. Usage: considered
silly. Rare outside Unix sites. See also dd,
BLT. Among Unix fans,
cat(1)
is considered an excellent example of user-interface design, because it
delivers the file contents without such verbosity as spacing or headers
between the files, and because it does not require the files to consist of
lines of text, but works with any sort of data. Among Unix haters,
cat(1)
is considered the canonical example of
bad user-interface design, because of its woefully
unobvious name. It is far more often used to blast
a file to standard output than to concatenate two files. The name cat for the former operation is just as unintuitive
as, say, LISP's cdr. Of such oppositions are holy wars
made.... See also UUOC.
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