For very good reason. tail is used strictly for viewing files, so it makes sense to have a visual divider. "cat" is short for "concatenate". How about this scenario. You break down a file into several pieces, to fit onto floppies. You copy them back onto a filesystem somewhere. You cat them back together again into the original file. What do you think will happen when you try to run the binary program if cat has just put a bunch of dividers into the file?
-Matt > try tail on multiple files, it will show a divider marking the end of > one file, and the beginning of another. > > cat does not have this behaviour. _______________________________________________ Bug-textutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils
