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A comment on Cool, but obscure Unix tools. Parent comment

Re:Cool, but obscure Unix tools by jshb on Saturday May 21, 2011 @04:43AM (#2570504)
Why does cat need the ability to add line numbers anyway? It seems outside the scope of it's purpose. Next it'll need ability to translate Russian to English.

If I ever needed line numbering, I would output into a file and open it in a far more capable text editor/viewer that was designed for doing that well.

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Re:Cool, but obscure Unix tools by AlecSchueler on Saturday May 21, 2011 @08:36PM (#2572250)
Indeed - `nl` should be preferable to `cat -n` for that reason even if for no others. People have been actually saying this since at least 1983 (http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/).

I'm often surprised that cat is anywhere near as popular as it is. I think I've used it for actual file concatenation maybe two times in the past three years.

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