cat -u

[Eirik Fuller]

In article <5105 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
)  ...
) But the opposite is quite true.  A program that makes nonprinting
) characters printable should accept multiple filenames.
) ...

By this line of reasoning we can do away with cat altogether.  If I
want to concatenate a list of files, I can just

sed -n -e p /etc/passwd /etc/group

By the same reasoning we can eliminate grep; do I understand
correctly that grep got its name from the idiom g/re/p in ed, where
re means regular expression?  The intent of implementing grep
separately was that it was a likely thing to do (based on studies of
what people actually did), and as such was worth speeding up.
Nonetheless, I could live without grep if I still had sed.

So, cat -v can either be Yet Another Switch in your favorite kitchen
sink, or you can get by with a simple if slow sed script that does
the same thing.

No, I don't use sed as my login shell :-)  Yes, I use cat -v; why?
because it's there ...