PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
abuseofcats.com
PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#2[deleted]
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#3> Since 1995, occasional awards for UUOC have been given out, usually by Perl luminary Randal L. Schwartz
http://catb.org/jargon/html/U/UUOC.html
Admittedly its taken me a long time to remember that the file is the last argument to grep, when so many other commands its the first. I'd guess common abuse is due to being easier to type cat x | than to dig up the man page
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#4I’m going to keep doing it but wouldn’t mind it if my shell auto replaced it for me.
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#5[flagged]
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#6In this day an age this is still making rounds ? So this is the memory usage of cat on my system:
VSZ RSS SZ CMD
3252 1608 813 /bin/cat
Now for firefox:
VSZ RSS SZ CMD
3472212 395968 868053 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#7> Since 1995, occasional awards for UUOC have been given out, usually by Perl luminary Randal L. Schwartz http://catb.org/jargon/html/U/UUOC.html Admittedly its taken me a long time to remember that the file is the last argument to grep, when so many other commands its the first. I'd guess common abuse is due to being easier to type cat x | than to dig up the man page
And also typing cat x to get a quick look at the file, hitting up, then piping that into another command and taking a look, hitting up, piping that result into a third command etc.
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#8[flagged]
Chances are the file stays the same and what Im grepping for changes, so after the first run, it was less work for me not needing to go back as far in the command
cat file | grep thingone
cat file | grep thingtwo
grep thingone file
grep thingtwo fileRe: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#9[flagged]
Chances are the file stays the same and what Im grepping for changes, so after the first run, it was less work for me not needing to go back as far in the command cat file | grep thingone cat file | grep thingtwo Vs grep thingone file grep thingtwo file
That's fine. It's fine to do the thing that brings you joy.
Re: PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
#10Presumably written by someone without much interactive shell experience.
When you're building a pipeline, putting cat first can often be quite convenient. Essentially, it's more composable: it defines the input to the pipeline without committing to a specific tool. For example, you can up-arrow in the shell and change the part after the pipe without having to skip back past the filename.
In fact if you don't start with cat, it's possible you're more of a script kiddie than a software developer.