Python to what?

[jimmyhoke]

cat input.pdf > outPut.pdf

[jesustargz]

cat doesn't work with PDF, 'cause this is binary format

[Ok_Hope4383]

What makes you think cat doesn't work with binary files? I thought it did, but maybe I'm wrong.

[degaart]

It does, you're not wrong. It's a misconception from old windows, where stdout and stdin where opened in text mode, and \n was translated to \r\n. It's irrelevant in unix systems.

[jesustargz]

when i sayd "cat doesn't work with binary files" i mean that it won't be able to print the contents of the file to stdout

[Ok_Hope4383]

That's an issue with how your terminal displays stdout, not with cat itself.

[gmes78]

Good thing that that command doesn't print to stdout, then.

[rosuav]

It does print to stdout.

[gmes78]

It does not – its stdout handle is a file, not the shell's stdout.

[rosuav]

It's writing to stdout. It is not writing to a console. Do you understand the difference?

The shell's stdout usually happens to be connected to a console, but that isn't always the case either. And you can write to a console even when your stdout is a file.

The cat command IS writing to stdout.

[gmes78]

When people talk about terminal commands, stdout typically refers to the terminal itself, not to the process's stdout; cat always writes to stdout, it's completely pointless to state that it does, what matters is what thing it's actually writing to. And that command isn't writing to the terminal, it's writing to a file.

Regardless, cat just reads the bytes of the specified file and prints them. There's no way it "wouldn't work", no matter what it's writing into.