1.\" Copyright (c) 1989, 1990, 1993 2.\" The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. 3.\" 4.\" This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by 5.\" the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. 6.\" 7.\" %sccs.include.redist.man% 8.\" 9.\" @(#)cat.1 8.2 (Berkeley) 11/04/94 10.\" 11.Dd 12.Dt CAT 1 13.Os BSD 3 14.Sh NAME 15.Nm cat 16.Nd concatenate and print files 17.Sh SYNOPSIS 18.Nm cat 19.Op Fl benstuv 20.Op Fl 21.Op Ar 22.Sh DESCRIPTION 23The 24.Nm cat 25utility reads files sequentially, writing them to the standard output. 26The 27.Ar file 28operands are processed in command line order. 29A single dash represents the standard input. 30.Pp 31The options are as follows: 32.Bl -tag -width Ds 33.It Fl b 34Implies the 35.Fl n 36option but doesn't number blank lines. 37.It Fl e 38Implies the 39.Fl v 40option, and displays a dollar sign 41.Pq Ql \&$ 42at the end of each line 43as well. 44.It Fl n 45Number the output lines, starting at 1. 46.It Fl s 47Squeeze multiple adjacent empty lines, causing the output to be 48single spaced. 49.It Fl t 50Implies the 51.Fl v 52option, and displays tab characters as 53.Ql ^I 54as well. 55.It Fl u 56The 57.Fl u 58option guarantees that the output is unbuffered. 59.It Fl v 60Displays non-printing characters so they are visible. 61Control characters print as 62.Ql ^X 63for control-X; the delete 64character (octal 0177) prints as 65.Ql ^? 66Non-ascii characters (with the high bit set) are printed as 67.Ql M- 68(for meta) followed by the character for the low 7 bits. 69.El 70.Pp 71The 72.Nm cat 73utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. 74.Sh BUGS 75Because of the shell language mechanism used to perform output 76redirection, the command 77.Dq Li cat file1 file 2 > file1 78will cause the original data in file1 to be destroyed! 79.Sh SEE ALSO 80.Xr head 1 , 81.Xr more 1 , 82.Xr pr 1 , 83.Xr tail 1 84.Rs 85.%A Rob Pike 86.%T "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful" 87.%J "USENIX Summer Conference Proceedings" 88.%D 1983 89.Re 90.Sh HISTORY 91A 92.Nm 93command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. 94