One of the reasons I like zsh is its copious expansion flags. If you aren't wedded to POSIX or bash syntax, consider zsh for this reason alone.

In the case of the first example he shows, the cat -n problem, you can do the following in zsh to expand the results of the wildcard globbing automatically:

    cat *(:A)

This will give cat full paths. Not significantly different from the PWD referenced with ./* in his example, but more universal in applicability, particularly when you start to use things like the file type filters:

    cat *(.:A)

giving you only files, not directories, and also expanding to absolute paths, while

    cat **/*(.:A)

does the same for plain files in the working directory and all subdirectories as well.

Remember to test your patterns with a print statement first:

    print -l **/*(.:A)

before passing them to a command.