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