3 ms·

Don't get your hopes up - it seems to remain possible the abbreviation preceded this document and was misattributed by Richie.

• geofft 11y ago
  OK, but at that point it's equally possible that it stands for "catharsis" and represents a file, previously being kept inwardly on disk, being released to standard output. The command doesn't predate UNIX, so it's a very narrow window of time for Ritchie to have gotten it wrong. And I have not seen any claims from the 1970s or 1980s that the command stands for "catenate".
  • kps 11y ago
    > And I have not seen any claims from the 1970s or 1980s > that the command stands for "catenate". The Seventh Edition (1979) man page for cat(1) says “catenate and print”. Sixth Edition (1975) says “concatenate and print”.
    • LukeShu 11y ago
      This made me do my own investigating. The `csh` manual in 2BSD said "catenate" earlier in '79. Even before that, a comment in the ex (vi) 1.1 source code in 1BSD (1978) says "catenate". So it looks like Bill Joy made the mistake! (and the Bell Labs people thought it funny?)
  • dllthomas 11y ago
    'OK, but at that point it's equally possible that it stands for "catharsis" and represents a file, previously being kept inwardly on disk, being released to standard output.' Catenate and concatenate mean basically the same thing, it's trivially easy to see people confusing the two - they might even hear one for the other if they're only familiar with one. That's not going to happen with catharsis.