Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Concatenating with cat

The cat command displays or concatenates the contents of a file, but cat is capable of more. For example, cat can combine standard input data with data from a file. One way of combining the stdin data with file data is to redirect stdin to a file and then append two files. The cat command can do this in a single invocation. The next recipes show basic and advanced usages of cat.