Saturday, March 15, 2008

dog - better cat than cat

Every *nix user has used "cat" command. It takes one or more files or stdin, concatenates them and puts result into standard output. Common use case is to print out contents of some file to console.
$ cat ~/myfile.txt
Situation is nowadays different from the time cat was born. At that time, users were usualy connected to one mainframe and all was done on local system. Today we use web2.0 applications, which spread across several systems,. We use our computer as terminal for network services. That's why enhanced version of cat, that supports network URL as source and/or target, several string conversions, newline conversion, and more has emerged. The name of this utility is dog (after all, dogs are much more usefull. Don't you think ?).

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