>I modified your ifcat script to not redirect stderr to stdout and I
>get, as expected, an additional response (from stderr) when the "cat"
>fails ....  this then brings up the question of what happened to the
>stderr generated response that was redirected to stdout in your
>version?  

if cat $1 > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then
  echo "cat $1 worked just fine"
else
  echo "cat $1 returned with an error"
fi


2>&1 redirects standard error to wherever standard out is going at the time.
(and the shell processes its arguments from left to right).  Thus, 
stderr goes to /dev/null in the above program.

Jim Plank