I was going to tell Gil that “cat” is sort of like “type” in the command prompt (no big deal) but I thought I would open one to make sure that was the name of the command since I haven’t used it for years. I realize that I don’t know how to open the command prompt on this Windows 7 laptop.
With cat, which has something to do with concatenate, you can say “cat a b > c” which, as I recall, puts the contents of the files a and b into file c.
Frank
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gillian Densmore
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2016 6:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unix Nightmare
Oh that's easyish. If cat then[sleep, purr, want outside when owner is putting shoes, stare at owner at 5AM for food] dowhile this.owner {not,home}: [playrock, play WOW. break cheep_vase]
else notCat.now.
Though I have feeling unix tool that I don't understand.
On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 12:34 PM, ┣glen┫ <[hidden email]> wrote:
What makes this nightmarish (to me) is the broken contract between you and "cat", or larger between you and your OS. Such broken contracts are a part of all my nightmares. And the admittedly more pleasant aspects of the nightmare are the ways you try to restore your operational power inside the dream. It's the same old fear of spies, moles, talking behind one's back, etc. If you can't trust your closest relationships, you're truly lost.
But awake, it's relatively easy to admit that I don't understand "cat" any more than I understand pond scum or dogs. So, those contracts are delusions and the more one thinks they know their intimate relations, the more delusional they are. (Note that "delusional" isn't pejorative. Innovation is driven by delusion.)
On 10/21/2016 04:49 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> I first learned Unix when I went to work at Bell Labs in 1978. I was only there for two years but over the next 18 years at Carnegie Mellon I used Unix workstations or time-sharing systems almost constantly. The other night I had a dream that involved Unix. I am not saying the dream made sense. Dreams often don't. For some reason I had a feeling that someone had modified my system by replacing the cat command with a shell script that didn't behave the way cat should. I decided to use the which command to find where the fake cat script was located in the file system. But then I thought how can I examine the script without using cat. I was going around in circles about this until I sort of woke up. I realized that I could use ed to look at the script. Then I went back to sleep. Sometimes my memories of my dreams aren't accurate.
--
␦glen?
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