Shell Programming and Scripting

On slower machines a while back, writing scripts that open files with cat and then piping the ouptut into a program that could have opened the file all by itself got dubbed 'UUOC'.

It creates an extra process. On machines with more limited resources UUOC was discouraged, and still is, as a waste of system resources. An extension of that, creating way more child processes than need inside a loop is still a major performance issue.

http://http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html

Using anything unnecessarily should be discouraged, but to describe it as "useless" is overstating the mark.

It's not useless because it works. But it is unnecessary.

thanks buddies... it worked fine with both cat and "no cat". ..thanks a lot...

Is loop also required as well? How about this.

Code:

cd location1
cp `cat /path_if_any/base.txt|xargs` location2/