Greg Minshall <minsh...@umich.edu> wrote: > i think it was a Rob Pike paper, maybe Usenix, probably in the 1990s. > the idea, iirc, is that you can always pipe the output of cat(1) into > od(1), or into any other program you wanted, so keep cat simple. good > paper (but, sometimes i do `cat -v`).
By the way, here is excerpt from POSIX manual: RATIONALE Historical versions of the cat utility include the -e, -t, and -v, options which permit the ends of lines, <tab> characters, and invisible characters, respectively, to be rendered visible in the output. The standard developers omitted these options because they provide too fine a degree of control over what is made visible, and similar output can be obtained using a command such as: sed -n l pathname The latter also has the advantage that its output is unambiguous, whereas the output of historical cat -etv is not.
