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Comment by gcmalloc | Hacker News Reader

useless use of cat

    pv < "$1" > "$2"

Even if the cat at the beginning of a pipe isn't strictly necessary, it still helps readability to have everything flowing from left to right.

I also advocate this "useless" use of cat, but you can write the redirection before the command:

    <"$1" pv >"$2"

The bigger problem is that using cat destroys the file size information.

pv reads content from a file by default, so that can actually be reduced further to:

    pv "$1" > "$2"

Which will actually give better results this way, since it'll read the size of the file and use that to provide an estimate even.