FELIS(1) BSD General Commands Manual FELIS(1)NAMEfelis — File Contents Display (v1.0)
SYNOPSISfelis [inputfile ...]
DESCRIPTION
The felis utility sends the contents of text files to stdout. Unlike
cat, felis combines any number of white space (including new lines) into
a single blank, displaying the entire contents on a single line.
It strips any leading and trailing blanks, but inserts a blank space
between files.
With some files the effect of felis could be emulated by something like
echo `cat inputfile ...`
Alas, that does not always work. Hence the need for felis as a separate
program.
The felis utility exits 0 on success. Otherwise, the exit value equals
the number of files felis could not open.
USAGE
Displaying Files
felis inputfile ...
Inputfile is one or more text files.
If no inputfile is listed, felis reads its input from stdin.
The input contents can be in plain ASCII, in any of the ISO-8859 encod‐
ings, as well as in UTF-8.
Examples
sendmail `felis customers friends` < message
This will send the contents of message to addresses listed in customers
and friends.
Here is an example of a CGI shell script:
#!/bin/sh
echo Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
echo
script.cgi | felis
This will combine the HTML output of script.cgi into a single line, which
can save bandwidth.
Note that the HTTP header is sent out separately because it must end with
two new lines, which felis would strip otherwise.
HISTORY
Both felis and this manual page were written by G. Adam Stanislav
<adam@whizkidtech.net>.
The word felis is Latin for cat.
13 May 2000
