Useless Use of Cat Award (2000)
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>The fact that the same thread ("but but but, I think it's cleaner / nicer / not that much of a waste / my privelege to waste processes!") springs up virtually every time the Award is posted is also Ancient Usenet Tradition.
The time it saves me while writing and debugging that one off one liner is well worth the tiny overhead.
If you think cat is useless when reading a file for piping, why do you spawn multiple processes at all? Should'nt you write a custom tool that handles the whole series of operations in one single process?
And why not write it in asm while you are at it? You should certainly never use a garbage collector, right?
The award, as I remember, was not for using dead cat in a one-liner, it was for publishing this one-liner and propagating use of this small stupidity.
Your work one-liners grow organically, so it's completely normal that they accumulate cruft like `cut|sed|awk' pipeline, and there's little point to clean them up if they are not going to leave your shell instance.
> If you think cat is useless when reading a file for piping, why do you spawn multiple processes at all?
Strawman argument. The Useless Use of Cat Award is for using `cat' where the command fed with the file is perfectly fine with redirecting its input from the file directly (i.e., most of the commands). This is just as easy as using `cat', but avoids unnecessary CPU spinning.