FELIS(1)

NAME
felis - File Contents Display (v1.0)

SYNOPSIS
felis [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 encodings, 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.