1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other
output sink without pause. 2. By extension, to dump large amounts
of data at an unprepared target or with no intention of browsing it
carefully. Usage: considered silly. Rare outside Unix sites. See
also dd, BLT.
Among Unix fans, cat(1) is considered an excellent example
of user-interface design, because it delivers the file contents
without such verbosity as spacing or headers between the files, and
because it does not require the files to consist of lines of text,
but works with any sort of data.
Among Unix haters, cat(1) is considered the canonical
example of bad user-interface design, because of its
woefully unobvious name. It is far more often used to blast a
file to standard output than to concatenate two files. The name
cat for the former operation is just as unintuitive as, say,
LISP's cdr.
magic number n.
[Unix/C; common] 1. In source code
some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the
operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line
(hardcoded), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a
commented #define....
