below...

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

On Tue, 2 May 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote:

> 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

To Doug -- touché

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