3 May
2017
3 May
'17
8:57 p.m.
below...
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Tue, 2 May 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote:
To Doug -- touché
With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on
the table, I can't help
re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of
less --help | wc
Speaking of "cat", what really drives me
nuts is "cat file | cmd"...
What's wrong with "cmd < file" (or to really confuse newbies,
"< file
cmd")?
Not to be argumentative, but Dave, please be careful. I agree that
idiom is misused, but there are times when I think it is appropriate, which
is one of the reason why I love the Unix guiding principle of not "forcing"
the user to do one thing or another because we know better, but letting
education and good 'taste' be the guide.
I think Justice Potter Stewart described pornography of knowing it when
he sees it. IMO: there are time when using cat is in better taste that a
file redirection. For instance, I can think of a few examples when I need
to direct input from multiple files, using a more complex 'wye' style pipe
line or a redirection from backward quotes, that the cat foo sequence seems
like its easier to understand/debug. [Maybe it shows my inner
schizophrenia and heard voices from multiple places that I kinda like the
'wye' command].
Clem