[ygra]

Well, the notion that text can be safely treated and manipulated as binary data and still make sense is what doesn't work here. It's the wrong tool for the job, then. That's kinda the same as reversing text byte by byte and complaining that all diacritics are wrong.

Yes, cat comes from simpler times, but if cat cannot be changed for compat reasons, then it should no longer be used to concatenate text files. At least if the result is somehow important. Text and binary data are simply two very different things and both need to be processed accordingly. Sure, there are a bunch of other operations that are immediately recognisable as not making sense on text at all and superficially concatenating files is not one of them, but in my eyes that's a bit shortsighted. You can safely use methods for binary data on text iff you know exactly what your text contains and that the operation is safe. Otherwise you may mangle things.