The underlying topic for this is that, most shells treat files/redirections as part of the individual commands and not part of the pipelines. Files should be so

The underlying topic for this is that, most shells treat files/redirections as part of the individual commands and not part of the pipelines. Files should be sometimes treated as commands instead, they plug into the fds of a process the same way as commands do. `cat x | head` attaches `cat x`'s stdout to `head`'s stdin, `< x head` just attaches `x`'s fd to stdin. In this way, treating a file like a "light-weight" command (light-weight because no backing process) makes more sense, `open x | head` perhaps Though I will note that, in a way, bash supports this, as it has a modules system, and one of the pre-existing modules in the source tree is a `cat` replacement, through my lack of understanding of C prevents me from working out if its optimal https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/examples/loadables/cat.c https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/examples/loa...