Hacker News Reader

Comment by dblotsky | Hacker News Reader

What makes it useless? It’s functionally the same but makes it easier to author pipelines, which I think is a valid use.

  cat foo | bar

is useless use of cat, since it’s equivalent to

  < foo bar

which is both shorter and starts one less process. Why do you think that “cat” makes it “easier to author pipelines”?

1). It doesn’t work in all shells, so you have to think about your environment before you use it.

2). I often start with `bar < foo`, so if I need to add more arguments to `bar`, I need to always skip over the input.

3). If I just want to delete all processing and look at the input, I can’t just backspace away the processing because `< foo` is invalid.