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The useful use of cat

It is fine to begin your shell commands with cat

This is fine really, achieves conceptual equivalence with the “ first step as the command-agnostic input ” way of thinking I'm describing, and is shorter to boot. I don't need to put any conscious thought into deciding if the shell pipeline is going to be complicated or not, and if I choose incorrectly I can still easily transition between the two modes. But what I disike are the people who go around giving the “useless use of cat award” to insist that others also stop using it.

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