
Lots of useful shell scripting tips or Useless Use of Cat Award - georgecmu
http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html
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telemachos
olefoo got this right the last time I saw this come up here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117032>

_The whole 'useless use of cat' meme is basically designed to let Randal
Schwartz make fun of people. At one point it may have made a difference, and
certainly if you have a shell script that is getting called 10,000 times a day
it might make sense to optimise it. But for doing stuff from the commandline;
weird shell acrobatics is a premature optimisation._

If you know that you can use a command directly on a filename or _-_ , then
great: skip _cat_. If you're not sure, and you use _cat_ , great: get some
work done. If you like to write _< somefile command_, great: I actually like
how that looks. If you prefer the readability (real or alleged, I don't care)
of _cat file | command_ , fine: go nuts. Surely there have to be more
important things to worry about.

Since it got a lot of comments and votes, here's the entire previous thread I
had in mind: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116085>

