coreutils: cat invocation
1
1 3.1 ‘cat’: Concatenate and write files
1 ======================================
1
1 ‘cat’ copies each FILE (‘-’ means standard input), or standard input if
1 none are given, to standard output. Synopsis:
1
1 cat [OPTION] [FILE]...
1
11 The program accepts the following options. Also see ⇒Common
options.
1
1 ‘-A’
1 ‘--show-all’
1 Equivalent to ‘-vET’.
1
1 ‘-b’
1 ‘--number-nonblank’
1 Number all nonempty output lines, starting with 1.
1
1 ‘-e’
1 Equivalent to ‘-vE’.
1
1 ‘-E’
1 ‘--show-ends’
1 Display a ‘$’ after the end of each line.
1
1 ‘-n’
1 ‘--number’
1 Number all output lines, starting with 1. This option is ignored
1 if ‘-b’ is in effect.
1
1 ‘-s’
1 ‘--squeeze-blank’
1 Suppress repeated adjacent blank lines; output just one empty line
1 instead of several.
1
1 ‘-t’
1 Equivalent to ‘-vT’.
1
1 ‘-T’
1 ‘--show-tabs’
1 Display TAB characters as ‘^I’.
1
1 ‘-u’
1 Ignored; for POSIX compatibility.
1
1 ‘-v’
1 ‘--show-nonprinting’
1 Display control characters except for LFD and TAB using ‘^’
1 notation and precede characters that have the high bit set with
1 ‘M-’.
1
1 On systems like MS-DOS that distinguish between text and binary
1 files, ‘cat’ normally reads and writes in binary mode. However, ‘cat’
1 reads in text mode if one of the options ‘-bensAE’ is used or if ‘cat’
1 is reading from standard input and standard input is a terminal.
1 Similarly, ‘cat’ writes in text mode if one of the options ‘-bensAE’ is
1 used or if standard output is a terminal.
1
1 An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value
1 indicates failure.
1
1 Examples:
1
1 # Output f's contents, then standard input, then g's contents.
1 cat f - g
1
1 # Copy standard input to standard output.
1 cat
1