4 ms·

I'd heard of concatenate, but never catenate. I guess concatenate is a verb, and catenate is an adjective.

• AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  "Concatenate" seems redundant to me, as the Latin prefix "con" means "together" and the root "caten" is a chain. So technically it's "chain together", but a chain is already a thing that is linked together. My Latin is rusty, but IIRC "con" can optionally just be added for emphasis, e.g. "iacere": to throw, but "conicere":to hurl. Maybe that's what was done here.
  • i_am_programmer 6y ago
    Links in a chain are already together. You absolutely can chain 2 things together that are not the chain itself. Where chain is used as a verb to describe the tying of things together. Saying chain together absolutely makes sence. Example "His ankles were chained together".
• mprovost 6y ago
  I thought maybe they chose "cat"enate to avoid a naming clash with a "con" command but looking back through the early Unix sources there doesn't appear to have been one.
  • comfydragon 6y ago
    Maybe it was to avoid confusion with Lisp's "cons" which conventionally (or always? It's been a while...) adds to the head of a list, whereas "cat" is a bit closer to adding to the tail. This is pure speculation on my part.