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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Preach. This happens to me all the time and keeps happening.

There's a lot of Unix/Linux stuff that I wish I could UNlearn, I'm aware of other tools but muscle memory keeps me using worse things.

(honestly, I also feel this way about vim as well as 'writing in cursive')

I feel you.

I still `cat foo | grep bar` instead of `grep foo bar`

The reason I stick to `cat foo | grep bar` is that I am never quite sure if `grep bar foo` would be correct instead (it is).

The file argument is usually the last so that you can do eg `grep foo -- *`

I remember it as "grep for a needle in a haystack"

But to me -- this is different?

I believe "useless use of cat" is FAR MORE useful than what the ultra-nerds say; I could care less about "saving a few characters."

The mental model of the pipeline --in one end and out the other -- is entirely too usefully intuitive and way better than some imaginary geek-cred.

(I was more thinking about the new rust tools, e.g. rg instead of grep)

Plus sometimes you want to throw something like `pv` in.

Plus the regex is more likely incorrect in the first attempt and needs to be fixed.

The former has one big advantage: I can easily change "needle" without having to skip all over the cmdline...

Pretty usefull when debugging something interactively.

Might help to replace

    cat foo | $command

with

    <foo $command

It's the same order, but I think $command can sniff what kind of file stdin is, and optimize.

Actually instead of `grep bar foo`.