6 ms·

I always wondered where the name cat came from which the article doesn’t address. Any ideas?

• drivers99 8y ago
  It's short for conCATenate. original man page: http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/cat http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/cat
  • ccannon 8y ago
    Ah now I understand!
  • Isamu 8y ago
    Actually catinate, which is a real word but less used. But you are still right.
    • LukeShu 8y ago
      In the earliest references, it was "concatenate". It wasn't until 7th edition UNIX (1979) that "catenate" was given. References: - 1971 draft (pre 1st edition) of the paper that would become the well-known 1974 CACM UNIX paper (earliest documentation on `cat` that I can find): https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero-OCR.pdf https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_... (tune in on page 28) - 6th edition cat(1) man page (1975): http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/cat http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/cat - 7th edition cat(1) man page (1979): http://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/1/cat http://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/1/cat
      • swoopitypoop 8y ago
        Latin root word "catena", meaning "chain".
        • loeg 8y ago
          Latin root "con-" ("com-") meaning "with," or "together." As in, "concatenate" means something like, "chain together." https://www.etymonline.com/word/com- https://www.etymonline.com/word/com- https://www.etymonline.com/word/concatenate https://www.etymonline.com/word/concatenate
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • rbobby 8y ago
    And that was because it's function was/is to concatenate files: cat f1 f2 f3 >f4