Just a nitpick. The real use of cat is to concatenate two or more files and dump the result in its stdout. But people use it more like file viewer these days.
Bat is a file viewer in every sense. I have concatenated multiple files using bat. It does come in handy sometimes. But even the concatenated output is designed to be a visual aid, not the traditional concatenation that cat does.
To be 100% fair, Bat only acts this way when used in an interactive environment. As far as I know, in non-interactive cases (a la shell scripting) it falls back to normal cat behaviour
> Whenever bat detects a non-interactive terminal (i.e. when you pipe into another process or into a file), bat will act as a drop-in replacement for cat and fall back to printing the plain file contents
which was good enough for me personally, but I also have seen anecdotal evidence of people running `alias cat=bat` with a bunch of your usual bash piping work without any issues
A very wide used command line program that prints out the contents of a file on a terminal. Chances are pretty high cat is installed on your system already.
Example: If you're navigating to the folder of a git repository in your terminal and quickly want to see what the readme says without having to open a file manager or going to the website on github/gitlab/codeberg you can run:
cat README.md
Which shows the text stored in that file directly in your terminal window.
bat does essentially the same, only fancier, with syntax highlighting, some formatting and colors.
No. What is stated by the manual is what cat does. What you said was simply incorrect.
It does have the effect of what you describe if one file is supplied and might be the most common use case. That doesn't make your description correct, at best it makes it incomplete.
