cat [from `catenate' via Unix cat(1)] vt.
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....