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Comment by alexkus | Hacker News Reader

My favourite seemingly-useless-but-actually-not-useless use of cat:-

    ls | cat

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Or just

    ls -1

(that's a digit one)

Ah, but with the --color=auto option on ls (which I have set in my aliases) there's a difference between "ls -1" and "ls | cat"

Indeed there's even a difference between "ls -1" and "ls -1 | cat" if "--color=auto" is specified.

I use this for programs which otherwise output to pagers, when I'd rather have the output just in terminal scrollback. (And unlike the -1 option it's generic to all programs with terminal behaviors.)

Why is it not actually useless?

It makes the output for ls not a terminal, so ls won't try to present the output in a nice human-readable format, with columns and colors etc.

Of course there's switches for all that in ls somewhere, but still...

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