Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

I'm whatever the opposite of a code golf extremist is.

E.g. I hate the so called "useless use of cat." I uselessly use cat all the dang time; visualizing the pipeline is infinity more useful then, what, "elegance?" Who cares?

View on HN

Same here. I use `cat` as a tool to read data from the filesystem into a pipeline, regardless if that's the initial intention of the tool. I don't want the input filename being to the right of the first manipulation command in a pipeline that's supposed to read left to right!

Its actually part of the POSIX standard that redirections can be put anywhere in the command line, so one can do:

  <file.txt sed 's/some/filter' | other_cmd

on any standard compliantish shell :) (I use zsh, and I know it also works for bash and dash)

Never knew this. Looking at it now. First impression, I can't tell if this is idiotic or genius :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com