PCAT(1) General Commands Manual PCAT(1)

pcat — expand and concatenate files (LEGACY)

pcat file...

The pcat utility unpacks files in the format used by pack(1) and writes the unpacked form to standard output. For each file operand, a file named file .z (or just file , if file ends in .z ) is unpacked.

A file is not written in its unpacked form if:

  • The file cannot be opened.
  • The file does not appear to be the output of pack(1) .

None.

The following operand is supported:

file
A pathname of a file to be pcat ed; file can include or omit the .z suffix.

Not used.

The input files are regular files in the format produced by the pack(1) utility.

The following environment variables may affect the execution of pcat :

Provide a default value for the internationalisation variables that are unset or null. If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value from the implementation-dependent default locale will be used. If any of the internationalisation variables contains an invalid setting, the utility will behave as if none of the variables had been defined.
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalisation variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single- as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
Determine the location of message catalogues for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

Default.

The standard output is the concatenation of the unpacked files identified by the file operands.

Used only for diagnostic messages.

None.

None.

The following exit values are returned:

Successful completion.
An error occurred.

Default.

The pcat utility does for packed files what cat(1) does for ordinary files, except that pcat cannot be used as a filter.

Applications should migrate to the utility.

To view a packed file named file .z use:

pcat file.z
or: 
pcat file

To make an unpacked copy, called , of a packed file named file .z (without destroying file .z use: pcat file >abc

None.

pack(1) , unpack(1) , zcat(1) .

February 1997 posix.fail