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Comment by ferrari8608 | Hacker News Reader

It's not nice to abuse innocent cats.

    python -mjson.tool < unformatted.json | vim -

If you're not using cat to concatenate things, the shell can probably handle the job.

People like cat because it allows notating the command closer to how they think. How can I pipe while putting the file first?

Well, just do it:

    < unformatted.json python -mjson.tool | vim -

What's the immediate advantage for me in using a less intuitive syntax? I understand cat is meant to concatenate files, so what?