COPYRIGHT NOTICE:

   cat 37.1 (29.6.96) is Copyright (c) 1996 by Ralph Seichter, all rights
reserved. You are allowed to copy it freely and use it as you wish, as long
as you don't modify the distribution archive or its contents. Note that you
*MUST NOT* take money for giving away copies to other users!

	Ralph Seichter		e-mail: zodiac@darkness.gun.de
	Am Christenrain 12
	56479 Stein
	Germany

   Feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions or bug reports.
Please use e-mail if possible.



PURPOSE:

   Some of you may know 'cat' from UNIX systems, and I decided to write an
AmigaOS version which is smaller than 'GNUcat' (2680 bytes) and supports
all dos.library wildcards. 'cat' is pure and can be made resident by adding
the line

   Resident cat PURE ADD

to your user-startup or startup-sequence.

   The template for 'cat' is FILE/M/A,BUFFERS/N. BUFFERS defines the number
of 1 KB buffers used for copying (default = 64), while FILE allows passing
multiple file names or name patterns (including wildcards).

   Imagine a huge file 'foo' which has been split into pieces on a UNIX
platform, resulting in the output files foo.aa, foo.ab, foo.ac, [...],
foo.zx, foo.zy, foo.zz. To retrieve the original file, you could use the
'Join' command in your C: directory

   1> join foo.aa foo.ab ... foo.zy foo.zz as foo

Unfortunately you would have to enter each of the 676 file names manually.
If that's not your idea of fun, simply use

   1> cat foo.?? > foo

instead, and you're done. By the way, if you ask yourself why this tool is
called 'cat': the name does not stand for a feline, but as an abbreviation
for 'concatenate'.



OPERATION:

   'cat' processes each of the given file names (or patterns) in sequential
order. File names matching the current pattern are sorted alphabetically
to guarantee proper ordering, and then the files' contents are written to
the standard output channel. Then, the next pattern is processed. You will
usually want to redirect the output into a file or a pipe. Here are some
usage examples:

   1> cat foo bar > foobar

      Join foo and bar as foobar.

   1> cat #?.doc DH2:dir2/#?.doc > DH1:documents

      Concatenate files with the suffix .doc found in the current directory
      and after that the files in DH2:dir2/ into the file DH1:documents.

   1> cat foo.?? | gzip > foo.gz

      The files matching foo.?? are piped to GNUzip, the compressed output
      is written to foo.gz.

   If you ask "why not use 'Type' instead?", please note that 'Type' does
not sort matching file names first, so ordering is unpredictable.



REQUIREMENTS:

   'cat' requires dos.library V37 (Kickstart 2.04) or better.



DISCLAIMER:

   THIS MATERIAL IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION
ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF NONINFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE USE, RESULTS, AND
PERFORMANCE OF THIS MATERIAL IS ASSUMED BY YOU AND IF THE PRODUCT SHOULD
PROVE TO BE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE ENTIRE COST OF ALL NECESSARY
SERVICING, REPAIR, OR OTHER REMEDIATION.