Hello Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc Coulon wrote: > Thank you for the clear and detailed informations.
You are most welcome. I know it was a confusing case. > Yes, *I* use cat (display a file on a terminal) as you said since... well... > maybe 1976 ;) But in these years, the standard output was a belt printer. I started sometime around 1980 on a Honeywell with paper terinals. Well... Probably earlier on a Radio Shack TRS-80 which I could play with at the local store. It took a couple of more years before I encountered my first Unix system. But I have been here ever since! > And yes, the culprit was the prompt. I'm using zsh with a fancy prompt. > Switching to a basic prompt solved the problem. I was confident that was the problem. :-) > I was confused because this file used to be "displayable" with the cat > command (which is very handy to do this kind of thing). I can guess that your prompt has probably gotten fancier. But regardless this is a good thing to find anyway. Because shouldn't that troublesome VERSION file have a newline at the end? Sounds like a worthwhile task to go poke at on that project. > For those interested in, the manpage of the 1st edition of UNIX manual was > saying: > > 11/3/71 CAT (I) > NAME cat -- concatenate and print > SYNOPSIS cat file1 ... > DESCRIPTION cat reads each file in sequence and writes it on > the standard output stream. Thus: > cat file > is about the easiest way to print a file. Also: > cat file1 file2 >file3 > is about the easiest way to concatenate files. > If no input file is given cat_ reads from the > standard input > > So there are some excuses using cat as a "way to print a file". Yes. I didn't want to mention the man page for it because of that text mentioning "printing". But I think it is actually incorrect as soon as paper printing terminals were replaced with CRT terminals. Back in the days when everyone used a teletype or the later paper terminals then using cat to emit a file to the terminal does print it because the terminal was a paper terminal. But as soon as CRTs came along I think that documentation became incorrect because on a CRT emitting the file to the terminal no longer printed it. But without a real pressing need to change the documentation it still stands all of the way to this day regardless of the lack of anyone having seen a paper terminal in many years. But you have forgotten the other venerable claim for using 'cat' as well. It has often been claimed that a Unix wizard is one that among other things writes device drivers with cat redirected from the terminal. :-) Bob
