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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like piping the output of cat and the mental image of one process feeding another. It's inconsequential, but it brings an epsilon of joy.
same I just like monads lol. cat + pipe feels purer and has lower mental load for me, which dominates the efficiency of spawning an extra process for, typically, a few microseconds.
cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3 | ... | cmdn
The beauty of cat is that streams are the universal interface. Program A might accept a file as the last positional arg. Program B might accept it as a named arg, where the name/flag could be anything from --input or -f or --file etc. But a program will read from STDIN, which all good unix programs do, then piping cat into it works every time. I can write the cat foo.txt part before I even know what command I'm pipin…
Yes, but "cat" is superfluous anyway. You can start your pipeline with a file redirection: " output_file".