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Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

that’s a lesson that’s no longer applicable on modern machines I think? —- it often makes sense to start a sequence of piped commands with a cat invocation. One reason is that then the order of sources and sinks in the command syntax matches reality.

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I always pipe from cat, as a matter of habit.

Reason being: I've probably just catted the file at least once, and it's even likely I catted it right before piping it. So I can extend that command from the history, and if I keep piping (likely) I don't have the weird syntactic stutter at the beginning where `blah < file.txt` | next` puts things out of order.

Also, you can't mistype `cat file.txt | blah` and overwrite file.txt accidentally with the output of blah. That's ergonomic.

‘<file.txt blah’ works just fine.

It's preference, like Python list comprehensions vs Ruby method chain.

I often use cat because when constructing a pipeline I'll do multiple rounds of:

    head filename | ...

Once its working I find it easy to just type C-aM-dcat (i.e. beginning-of-line kill-word cat).

Thanks for the reminder (sincerely) but to me this is worse, I would use a shell which doesn't offer this particular form of irregular grammar, I hate it.

100% aesthetic, I shouldn't be able to point a file at my prompt and have it end up streamed into the next word. Just awful, 0/10, do not want.

From another perspective it’s more regular that position doesn’t matter. (This behavior works in all POSIX shells, zsh, rc, etc. But not fish :p)

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