> that may or may not be redirected to a file

This is usually knowable.

It's a different question whether cat should be doing that, though – it's an extremely low level tool. What's wrong with `less`? (Other than the fact that some Docker images seem to not include it, which is pretty annoying and raises the question as to whether `docker exec` should be filtering escape sequences...)

Sometimes you don't want to open stuff in a pager.