Greg Minshall 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, 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.
