4 ms·

thank you! I knew some of that but learned a lot too.

• mthoms 5y ago
  Google the phrase "useless use of cat". To some, it's a faux-pas. Personally, I like the aesthetics of cat for my own scripts. It follows the "pipe flowing" idiom better. There are performance reasons why "useless cat" should be avoided though. So avoid it where performance is important (or when some other hardcore CLI jockey is going to see your code :))
  • hibbelig 5y ago
    I understand that people say you can replace foo < bar with <bar foo but I've never been able to get myself to do this.
  • bofh23 5y ago
    Avoiding “useless cat” on the command line is premature optimization. Sure, don’t do it in a script that is invoked a lot but it shouldn’t be a concern when prototyping a filter pipeline. $ cat foo | head -4 b a c b $ cat foo | head -4 | sort a b b c $ cat foo | head -4 | sort | uniq -c 1 a 2 b 1 c $ cat foo | head -4 | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1nr | head -1 2 b