3 ms·
> 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 “caten
by 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 agoThis 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?)