4 ms·
There's really nothing useless about that use of cat: it makes the pipeline compose better from left to right. It's not like you have to pay 25 cents for each p
by j0057 6y ago
There's really nothing useless about that use of cat: it makes the pipeline compose better from left to right. It's not like you have to pay 25 cents for each process you spawn.
- xorcist 6y agoSo does the pipeline above. It's not detrimental to performance since an empty cat is a no-op in a pipeline. You can have any number of them. But commands should be written for humans to understand, and inserting no-ops is a distraction to the reader. In the trivial example, "grep needle haystack" reads better than "cat haystack | grep needle".