cat is misunderstood a lot. The purpose of cat is to combine multiple files together (it’s literally short for “concatenate”), like cat *.log to combine all log files together.
If you’re just using it for a single file, then you should just redirect the file to stdin. These two command lines behave similarly:
cat foo.txt | some-command
some-command < foo.txt
For head, tail, grep and some other commands, you can just pass in the file name directly as an argument (e.g. grep whatever foo.txt).
You’ll see cat FILE | all the time because it’s just a natural start to a pipeline. You cat FILE to see the content unfiltered before filtering it with further commands.
catis misunderstood a lot. The purpose of cat is to combine multiple files together (it’s literally short for “concatenate”), likecat *.logto combine all log files together.If you’re just using it for a single file, then you should just redirect the file to stdin. These two command lines behave similarly:
cat foo.txt | some-commandsome-command < foo.txtFor
head,tail,grepand some other commands, you can just pass in the file name directly as an argument (e.g.grep whatever foo.txt).If I just want to look at the file, is there a better way than
cat foo.txt? I guess I can’t just do< foo.txtSo close! you have to do
cat < foo.txt:-) (/s)You’ll see
cat FILE |all the time because it’s just a natural start to a pipeline. Youcat FILEto see the content unfiltered before filtering it with further commands.Also known as cat abuse.
awww what’s a cat without a head and a tail?
A kernel?
uhmm no