CAT(1)

💖 CAT(1) — the concatenate girlie 💖

okay so you found the cat page, welcome bestie, this is the General Commands Manual and it's literally the most iconic little utility in the whole toolbox 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

cat — concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, it reads standard input. no cap, that's the whole personality 🎀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

cat [OPTION]... [FILE]...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input. that's it, that's the job, and she ate 🔥

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💜 OPTIONS 💜

• -A, --show-all — same thing as -vET, all the sneaky characters get exposed ✨
• -b, --number-nonblank — number the nonempty output lines only, and heads up bestie, it overrides -n 👑
• -e — same thing as -vE
• -E, --show-ends — slap a $ at the end of every line so you can actually see where they end 💀
• -n, --number — number all the output lines, every single one
• -s, --squeeze-blank — suppress repeated empty output lines, we're not doing repetition today 🙈
• -t — same thing as -vT
• -T, --show-tabs — display TAB characters as ^I, so tabs stop gaslighting you
• -v, --show-nonprinting — use ^ and M- notation for the weird ones, except for LF (\n) and TAB (\t) 🫶
• -u — (ignored) yeah she's just standing there, ignored, lowkey iconic for it
• -h, --help — Print help 🧚
• -V, --version — Print version ⭐

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🌈 VERSION 🌈

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

Print the contents of a file to stdout:

cat path/to/file

Concatenate several files into an output file:

cat path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ... > path/to/output_file

Append several files to an output file:

cat path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ... >> path/to/output_file

Copy the contents of a file into an output file without buffering:

cat -u /dev/tty12 > /dev/tty13

Write stdin to a file:

cat - > path/to/file

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project at https://tldr.sh under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. (not me warning you about the WIP-ness, she's still growing okay 😭)

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and that's the page bestie, periodt 💖 this whole thing was served up from the General Commands Manual, dated 2026-09-25 — mwah, go concatenate something cute 🌸🦋✨