pussyfooting

[Guy Harris]

> Doug Gwyn writes...
> > "cat"'s function is to concatenate files.  Period.
> > 
> > The day this fails to be true is the day "cat" is no longer
> > a UNIX utility.
> 
> Yarbles! Great boolshy yarblockles to you!!! This is the kind of 
> thinking that keeps SYS V from being as good as 4.2BSD. `Cat' is alive
> and well in spite of what DMR said in the BSTJ. Even he can be wrong.

What kind of thinking?  The notion that the availability of N options
in "cat" is what makes 4.2BSD great?  Sorry, 'taint so.  A simple
linenumbering utility ("simple" here excludes "nl" - does anybody actually
use all the subsubsubsubsection stuff there?) does the job of "cat -n"
quite nicely, and a simple visual display utility does the job of "cat -v"
equally well.  Putting both those functions into "cat" makes as much sense
as putting file copying, file deleting, file renaming, directory listing,
etc., etc. into a program named, for the sake of argument, "PIP".

Besides, System V has, unfortunately, picked up "cat -v".

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy