cat

- concatenate and display files

Synopsis

/usr/bin/cat [-nbsuvet] [file...]

Description

The cat utility reads each file in sequence and writes it on the standard output. Thus:

example% cat file

prints file on your terminal, and:

example% cat file1 file2 >file3

concatenates file1 and file2, and writes the results in file3. If no input file is given, cat reads from the standard input file.

Options

The following options are supported by /usr/bin/cat:

-b

Number the lines, as -n, but omit the line numbers from blank lines.

-n

Precede each line output with its line number.

-s

cat is silent about non-existent files.

-u

The output is not buffered.

Buffered output is the default.

-v

Non-printing characters, with the exception of tabs, NEWLINEs and form feeds, are printed visibly. ASCII control characters (octal 000 - 037) are printed as ^n, where n is the corresponding ASCII character in the range octal 100 - 137 (@, A, B, C, . . ., X, Y, Z, [, \, ], ^, and _); the DEL character (octal 0177) is printed ^?. Other non-printable characters are printed as M-x, where x is the ASCII character specified by the low-order seven bits.

When used with the -v option, the following options can be used:

-e

A $ character is printed at the end of each line, prior to the NEWLINE.

-t

Tabs are printed as ^Is and form feeds to be printed as ^Ls.

The -e and -t options are ignored if the -v option is not specified.

Operands

The following operand is supported:

file

A path name of an input file. If no file is specified, the standard input is used. If file is - , cat reads from the standard input at that point in the sequence. cat does not close and reopen standard input when it is referenced in this way, but accepts multiple occurrences of - as file.

Usage

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of cat when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte (2³¹ bytes).

Examples

Example 1 Concatenating a File

The following command writes the contents of the file myfile to standard output:

example% cat myfile

Example 2 Concatenating Two files into One

The following command concatenates the files doc1 and doc2 and writes the result to doc.all.

example% cat doc1 doc2 > doc.all

Example 3 Concatenating Two Arbitrary Pieces of Input with a Single Invocation

When standard input is a terminal, the following command gets two arbitrary pieces of input from the terminal with a single invocation of cat:

example% cat start - middle - end > file

when standard input is a terminal, gets two arbitrary pieces of input from the terminal with a single invocation of cat.

If standard input is a regular file,

example% cat start - middle - end > file

would be equivalent to the following command:

cat start - middle /dev/null end > file

because the entire contents of the file would be consumed by cat the first time - was used as a file operand and an end-of-file condition would be detected immediately when - was referenced the second time.

Environment Variables

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of cat: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

Exit Status

The following exit values are returned:

0

All input files were output successfully.

>0

An error occurred.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

See Also

touch(1), attributes(5), environ(5), largefile(5), standards(5)

Notes

Redirecting the output of cat onto one of the files being read causes the loss of the data originally in the file being read. For example,

example% cat filename1 filename2 > filename1

causes the original data in filename1 to be lost.