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Full Discussion: UUOC police
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting UUOC police Post 302375840 by methyl on Sunday 29th of November 2009 07:18:26 PM
Old 11-29-2009
UUOC police

On my tests the blunt use of "cat" and pipe runs quicker and is easier to follow in scripts than when some well known applications read the file directly. One such application is "awk".

The UUOC argument makes some sense where a shell read providing direct input to a shell command could replace a "cat" to pipe. It makes no sense when the application is less efficient at reading data than "cat".

Last edited by methyl; 11-29-2009 at 08:37 PM.. Reason: Withdraw Reverse Polish Notation quote because too sarcastic.
 
CAT(1)							      General Commands Manual							    CAT(1)

NAME
cat - catenate and print SYNOPSIS
cat [ -u ] [ -n ] [ -s ] [ -v ] file ... DESCRIPTION
Cat reads each file in sequence and displays it on the standard output. Thus cat file displays the file on the standard output, and cat file1 file2 >file3 concatenates the first two files and places the result on the third. If no input file is given, or if the argument `-' is encountered, cat reads from the standard input file. Output is buffered in the block size recommended by stat(2) unless the standard output is a terminal, when it is line buffered. The -u option makes the output completely unbuffered. The -n option displays the output lines preceded by lines numbers, numbered sequentially from 1. Specifying the -b option with the -n option omits the line numbers from blank lines. The -s option crushes out multiple adjacent empty lines so that the output is displayed single spaced. The -v option displays non-printing characters so that they are visible. Control characters print like ^X for control-x; the delete char- acter (octal 0177) prints as ^?. Non-ascii characters (with the high bit set) are printed as M- (for meta) followed by the character of the low 7 bits. A -e option may be given with the -v option, which displays a `$' character at the end of each line. Specifying the -t option with the -v option displays tab characters as ^I. SEE ALSO
cp(1), ex(1), more(1), pr(1), tail(1) BUGS
Beware of `cat a b >a' and `cat a b >b', which destroy the input files before reading them. 4th Berkeley Distribution May 5, 1986 CAT(1)
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