I'm not arguing that, but to do what most people think of w.r.t what comes to mind when you talk about cat requires redirection. From the man page: The comman

I'm not arguing that, but to do what most people think of w.r.t what comes to mind when you talk about cat requires redirection. From the man page: The command: cat file1 will print the contents of file1 to the standard output. The command: cat file1 file2 > file3 will sequentially print the contents of file1 and file2 to the file file3, truncating file3 if it already exists. See the manual page for your shell (i.e., sh(1)) for more information on redirection.