joining multiple PDFs into one

[Ian Petersen]

Russ, you appear to be skimming, not really reading.

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Russ <rreiter91-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Everything is affected by the variables set by the shell when it is started.
> When the shell allows clobbering, existing file data is overwritten on
> cat something > somefile, when it doesn't, existing data is preserved.

You're talking about this:

cat oneInputFile > oneOutputFile

Others on this thread are talking about this:

cat oneInputFile anotherInputFile yetAnotherInputFile > oneOutputFile

The above command line is fundamentally different from what you're
talking about so please read it closely before replying.

The difference is that cat is being given three arguments rather than
one.  The request of cat is that it catenate those three files
together into standard out.  Once the bytes are sent to standard out,
the shell takes over and, in this case, redirects them to a file.  At
that point, the shell's clobbering settings kick in, possibly
affecting the results in the output file.  The shell's clobbering
settings should have nothing to do with what cat does with multiple
arguments, though.

Ian
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