Senthil Arivudainambi

The 1 in cat(1)

5 Sept 2015 2.35p

When you do man cat, you get an output like:

CAT(1)                    BSD General Commands Manual                   CAT(1)

NAME
    cat -- concatenate and print files

Ever wonder what the 1 in CAT(1) stands for? It’s the section for command as defined in Unix Programmer’s manual. Here’re the sections:

1. Commands
2. System calls
3. Subroutines
4. Special files
5. File formats and conventions
6. Games
7. Macro packages and language conventions
8. Maintenance