&gt; That is asinine. Why would a program be called ‘cat’ if it can’t concatenate multiple files?<p>Because he only thinks it&#x27;s the &quot;echo file to terminal&quot; command.<p>The main use of cat was mentioned in the Programming in the UNIX environment article.<p>&gt; The fact that cat will also print on the terminal is a special case.  Perhaps surprisingly, in practice it turns out that the special case is the main use of the program. [...] But what about -v? That prints non-printing characters in a visible representation.  Making strange characters visible is a genuinely new function, for which no existing program is suitable. [...] The answer is ‘‘No.’’  Such a modification confuses what cat ’s job is concatenating files with what  it  happens  to  do  in  a  common  special  case - showing  a file  on  the  terminal.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;harmful.cat-v.org&#x2F;cat-v&#x2F;unix_prog_design.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;harmful.cat-v.org&#x2F;cat-v&#x2F;unix_prog_design.pdf</a>