Of course I am not talking about the pet. Unix cat has two useful switches that I have overlooked for year.
First -e show end of line as $, I find that useful to check my shell script to see if I made and error when defining a variable.
Next is -A that will display tab as ^I. It was a life saver when I was troubleshooting an automated Debian script. I had to seed configuration variable and the program was expecting tab instead of space.