pcat - Unpack and display Huffman packed files

Format

pcat file ...

The pcat utility is fully supported for compatibility with older UNIX systems. However, it is recommended that the zcat utility be used instead because it may provide greater functionality and is considered the standard for portable UNIX applications as defined by POSIX.2 IEEE standard 1003.2-1992.

Description

pcat uncompresses files that were compressed by pack using a Huffman minimal redundancy code. The uncompressed data is sent to the standard output. This is handy for packed text files, but inappropriate for binary files, because the standard output is treated as a text stream. Binary files can be decoded in place by unpack.

The names of compressed input files are expected to end in .z. If a specified input file name does not end in this suffix, pcat automatically adds the .z. For example, if the command line specifies file abc, pcat looks for abc.z.

Localization

pcat uses the following localization environment variables:
  • LANG
  • LC_ALL
  • LC_CTYPE
  • LC_MESSAGES
  • NLSPATH

Exit values

0
Successful completion
n
Indicates that n files could not be unpacked properly. For example, if three out of six files could not be unpacked properly, the exit status is 3.

Related information

cat, file, pack, unpack