Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!tekcrl!eirik
From: eirik@tekcrl.TEK.COM (Eirik Fuller)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: cat -u
Summary: who needs cat?
Message-ID: <3397@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM>
Date: 18 Dec 88 06:50:16 GMT
References: <175@ernie.NECAM.COM> <189@wyn386.UUCP> <8910@smoke.BRL.MIL> <8160@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <146@minya.UUCP> <5077@bsu-cs.UUCP> <859@thor.stolaf.edu> <5105@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Sender: ftp@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 24

In article <5105@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
)  ...
) But the opposite is quite true.  A program that makes nonprinting
) characters printable should accept multiple filenames.
) ...

By this line of reasoning we can do away with cat altogether.  If I
want to concatenate a list of files, I can just

sed -n -e p /etc/passwd /etc/group

By the same reasoning we can eliminate grep; do I understand
correctly that grep got its name from the idiom g/re/p in ed, where
re means regular expression?  The intent of implementing grep
separately was that it was a likely thing to do (based on studies of
what people actually did), and as such was worth speeding up.
Nonetheless, I could live without grep if I still had sed.

So, cat -v can either be Yet Another Switch in your favorite kitchen
sink, or you can get by with a simple if slow sed script that does
the same thing.

No, I don't use sed as my login shell :-)  Yes, I use cat -v; why?
because it's there ...