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.

