My thoughts exactly. There are implementations of cat which don't have '-n' option: http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/cat.c http://plan9.bell-labs.com

My thoughts exactly. There are implementations of cat which don't have '-n' option: http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/cat.c http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/cat.c Not only "Gnu's not Unix", it's also not that much interested in following "Unix philosophy". Which isn't that bad, from a user perspective: users want more capable tools, even if it impedes composability a bit.