I am a bit confused on what a directory really is. In various places I read that in Linux directories are just strings that keep the names of the nested files. In that case is there a way to show excactly the contents of a directory just as we would by using `cat file`?

I would like a way to do `cat .` and then I would expect to get something like this:

```
\STARTfile1\0file2\0\END

```