Why "cat" command is known as "cat"?

[minal silimkar]

Meaning of "rm" is "remove", then what is the meaning of "cat" command?

[Jesper de Jong]

Maybe because it's not called "dog"? (Sorry...)

Wikipedia says:

The cat command is a standard Unix program used to concatenate and display files. The name is from catenate, a synonym of concatenate.

[Tim Holloway]

To construct Unix commands, you need 2 things:

1. a twisted sense of humor
2. An unwillingness to put any more letters in the command name than you actually have to.

I've actually seen the word as "catenate", but I doubt that's proper. The "con" in concatenate indicates putting things together.

[Jesper de Jong]

Here's something fun.

Unix also has a tac command. What do you think it does? And why do you think it is called "tac"?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Originally posted by Jesper Young:
Unix also has a tac command. What do you think it does? And why do you think it is called "tac"?

My guess would be displaying a file backwards. Whether it is backwards one character/word/line at a time, I don't know yet. Off to google...

[Stefan Wagner]

prompt> echo -e  "Foobar\nThis is a test with cat and tac"
Foobar
This is a test with cat and tac
prompt> echo -e  "Foobar\nThis is a test with cat and tac" | tac
This is a test with cat and tac
Foobar

[Charles Lyons]

What about this?

> echo "able was I ere I saw elba"
able was I ere I saw elba
> echo "able was I ere I saw elba" | rev
able was I ere I saw elba

purportedly spoken by Napoleon. What's going on?

[Tim Holloway]

aibohphobia - a dread fear of palindromes.

Listed in Stan Kelley-Bootle's The Devil's DP Dictionary.