NAME

get, cat -- (con)catenate (add, present) a file to something

PAGE DATE 1990318

GNU current cat manpage
1971 UNIX Programmer's Manual cat page

get is the simplest interface to unix shell piping and redirection. get takes the contents of a file, or input on it's standard input, and sends it to stdout. As such, get is illustrative of the powerful modularity that is a hallmark of unix. unix users that do not understand this fully are cheating themselves. In other words, get must be seen in context or it looks kinda dumb. It's not.

EXAMPLES

get

will cause subsequent typed terminal input (stdin) to be echoed (stdout) until a ^c or ^d is input.

get > flergy

constitutes a rudimentry editor. You can then type (your tty is stdin in this example) into flergy (on stdout). This will cease when you type ^c (ctrl and c) or ^d.

get flergy

will then catenate your edited file flergy to the display (stdout).

get >> flergy

will then append input to flergy. >> is append. > doesn't preserve the existing contents of a file. That is, >> won't "clobber" the previous contents of flergy. > will.

get *.c >> code

uses the shell wildcard pattern * to append all files in the current directory with the suffix .c to the file "code". The .c files will be appended in "asciibetical" order. This is the how to unsplit a file split with the "split" command.

get listing | sort | unique | page

submits the file "listing" to a pipe of commands that sorts listing, removes adjacent identical lines, and then sends the processed output to the page (most) display pager. Any command with output on stdout can begin such a pipe, but get is how to most simply send the contents of a file into the pipe.

SEE ALSO

Run the cLIeNUX guide program for more on stdin and redirection.
"echo" does with strings what get does with file contents, basically. cLIeNUX get is GNU cat, which also has some basic text-processing featurisms. The piping and redirection capability of get is not limited to text files. get -s removes extra blank lines, for example.

RIGHTS

Copyright 1999 Richard Allen (Rick) Hohensee
This file is released for redistribution only as part of cLIeNUX.