does cat work with binary files?

i.e in dos i used to split large files up to transport on floppy and rejoin them with the command copy /b blargh.zip + blargh2.zip blarghoriginall.zip Can i use the cat command to do this, and if not is there a command that can do it

Cat doesn't alter files since it isn't a filter like sed or awk for example. Therefore binary or ascii would make little difference to cat. However with things like binary files you just have to be sure that they can be joined like cat file1 file2 > file3. There is also a program for unix called split which will split files up.

ok thanks,
can i do cat file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 ...... fle16 >> file.gzip

you could name it file.gzip but its not going to be zipped up though by just doing that and also it won't combine the files.. it puts each of the contents of the files as one file, one after the other..
say i had two files.. file1 and file2 with each containing the word: "this is a test file"
If I did a cat file1 file2 > file.txt, then I opened the file to view the contents.. it would look like this:

"this is a test file"
"this is a test file"

Now if you want to compress a bunch of files and zip them up so you can unzip them with each being a separate file.. you would just want to zip them up using either tar or any other program.. etc.

i've got a pile of gzips. I am on an NT box at uni now, so i have zipped them up in one package and split it into 16 parts on floppys. The way i used to combine them in dos was with copy /b. So there are 16 parts to gzips.zip, i.e 01gzip.zip 02gzip.zip etc. If i do: cat 01gzip.zip 02gzip 03gzip.zip ... >> gzip.zip will it recreate the originall file, because included in these files is gcc so i canot compile a splitting program yet


just noticed i got a member next too my name now -woo hoo

The cat command will do exactly the same as the copy /b does for windows/dos. The only thing that could go wrong is that most likely you created a windows zip file. Using the standard linux tools you can't unzip pkzip files. You will need a utility called unzip for that.

yeah i got it on base install. It worked, although i was confused for a while when it wouldn't unzip (i had built the file the wrong way around)