''Felis domestica'', a small animal that usually lives in house provided by its staff. ''Felis Felis sylvestris catus'', from an alternate (and detailed) phylogeny (at least you can see why ''cat''). See http://www.fmnh.helsinki.fi/users/haaramo/Metazoa/Deuterostoma/Chordata/Synapsida/Eutheria/Carnivora/Aeluroidea/Felinae.htm for more... ---- ''cat'', a small utility that usually lives in bin provided by root's staff. [PBO] The name is said to be an abbrev. of ''concatenate'', which is one of [cat]'s uses. ---- Here's a partial reimplementation in Tcl from [Playing Bourne shell] (it does not write to stdout, but returns its results, for the caller to process further): proc cat files { set res "" foreach file [eval glob $files] { set fp [open $file] append res [read $fp [file size $file]] close $fp } set res } ;# RS ---- See [computer-assisted translation] ---- [LV] Too often, I see script writers misuse cat. For instance, they might write: cat abc | program1 While there are certainly times when cat-ing into a pipeline is the right things to do, this particular, simple, use is typically better written as program1 < abc or, if program1 supports it program1 abc ---- !!!!!! %| [Category Humor] | [Category Application] |% !!!!!!