So, I have two questions.
Is Plan9 an elaborate joke? I mean, I went to look at
http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man1/cat.html, for reasons that will become obvious later. It doesn't support any interesting flags (including "-v"), but all right, simplicity and shit.
But:
"Read always executes a single write for each line of input, which can be helpful when preparing input to programs that expect line-at-a-time data." -- what the fuck? Did they break the fundamental pipe abstraction, so it's now kind of like streams but actually sometimes sort of messages?
Second, do I understand correctly that "cat-v" stands for "cat -v" and means that they intend to make visible the ugly stuff? Then, why doesn't Plan9 support "-v" switch, and what's the opposite of "-v" switch, the reverse operation?