I find it very strange that you think it's not obvious that cat works with binary data. It's just a "dumb" program that reads from some files and sends it to st

I find it very strange that you think it's not obvious that cat works with binary data. It's just a "dumb" program that reads from some files and sends it to stdout, it doesn't care what the data is! One of the intended use cases of cat is reassembling files after they have been split with the "split" command!