Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)

Re:Awk in 20 Minutes (2015) by j0057 on Sunday May 03, 2020 @10:47AM (#23059310)

There's really nothing useless about that use of cat: it makes the pipeline compose better from left to right. It's not like you have to pay 25 cents for each process you spawn.

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Re:Awk in 20 Minutes (2015) by xorcist on Saturday May 09, 2020 @04:21AM (#23123079)

So does the pipeline above.

It's not detrimental to performance since an empty cat is a no-op in a pipeline. You can have any number of them. But commands should be written for humans to understand, and inserting no-ops is a distraction to the reader.

In the trivial example, "grep needle haystack" reads better than "cat haystack | grep needle".

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