> The time it saves me while writing and debugging that one off one liner is well worth the tiny overhead. The award, as I remember, was not for using dead cat

> The time it saves me while writing and debugging that one off one liner is well worth the tiny overhead. The award, as I remember, was not for using dead cat in a one-liner, it was for publishing this one-liner and propagating use of this small stupidity. Your work one-liners grow organically, so it's completely normal that they accumulate cruft like `cut|sed|awk' pipeline, and there's little point to clean them up if they are not going to leave your shell instance. > If you think cat is useless when reading a file for piping, why do you spawn multiple processes at all? Strawman argument. The Useless Use of Cat Award is for using `cat' where the command fed with the file is perfectly fine with redirecting its input from the file directly (i.e., most of the commands). This is just as easy as using `cat', but avoids unnecessary CPU spinning.