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Jan 22, 2024 at 16:48 comment added scubbo cat file | map | filter is only three characters more than <file map | filter, and it avoids the awkward implication that data is flowing "in the opposite direction to" the arrow. Perfectly reasonable to me. Performance-purists might rightly identify that there is overhead of another process, but this formulation is intended for experimentation (while writing and developing a utility-pipeline or exploring a dataset), not for high-performance production use.
Jan 20, 2024 at 17:48 comment added Jim @scubbo completely disagree with you. It's not an anti-pattern. It's far better to use system tools correctly and using STDIN is NOT intuitive in my subjective opinion. Objectively, there is absolutely no reason to use cat and @geedoubleya is absolutely correct. TBH, I don't even understand what @synthesizerpatel is trying to articulate in order to justify using it. But hey, if someone wants to type useless stuff and waste time doing it, I guess that's their prerogative. Let's stay away from cheering on poor practice please.
Oct 24, 2023 at 19:15 comment added scubbo > Do people not call out 'Useless Use of Cat' anymore? I would be happy to hear that this meme has died! It's an anti-pattern - as @synthesizerpatel points out, when iterating and experimenting in the shell, it's both neater and more intuitive to start the pipeline-of-commands with cat file.txt
Jun 28, 2023 at 23:24 comment added synthesizerpatel @geedoubleya I often cat the output of curl calls that I've saved to disc to jq and when I'm working on the jq string, I want the last argument to be my quoted jq script. Otherwise I have to keep re-typing or moving over the filename in the shell. Yuck.
Mar 7, 2023 at 18:21 comment added geedoubleya Do people not call out 'Useless Use of Cat' anymore? jq [options...] filter [files...]
Feb 8, 2021 at 1:10 history edited alec CC BY-SA 4.0
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Oct 10, 2020 at 2:06 history edited alec CC BY-SA 4.0
make this much easier to read, in case anyone comes this way
S Oct 10, 2020 at 1:54 history suggested thanasisp CC BY-SA 4.0
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Oct 10, 2020 at 1:35 vote accept alec
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Oct 9, 2020 at 23:00 answer added thanasisp timeline score: 73
Oct 9, 2020 at 22:56 history edited alec CC BY-SA 4.0
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Oct 9, 2020 at 22:48 history edited alec CC BY-SA 4.0
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Oct 9, 2020 at 22:13 history asked alec CC BY-SA 4.0