abuseofcats.com — stop abusing cat(1)
www.abuseofcats.com
cat file | grep is abuse. grep can open files by itself. Stop the useless use of cat.
  • pelya@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    16 days ago

    Huh, I actually forgot cat is used to join several files together. Last time I needed to concatenate two files, I did

    { cat file1 ; cat file2 ; } > output

    But the most valid case is when I want to unpack .gz or .xz archive but do not want to delete the original file, as xz -d will do by default. So I naturally do

    cat input.img.xz | xz -d > output.img

    I’ve heard rumours that xz has a special option to not delete the original file, but I know no one brave enough to search through the xz manpage.