Is cat overused in CLI examples, especially in stack-overflow answers? Yes.
Is the raw processing power consumed by cat going to negate your productivity? No.
Are the clever work-arounds people invent to avoid using cat at all really worth it? Probably not, but it looks cooler than something more readable than just using cat…
So, the example I was thinking of when I wrote this goes like so…
Somebody on stack overflow wanted to generate passwords in bash, somebody suggested this solution:
cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' | head -c 13
another user suggested this method to avoid using cat:
</dev/urandom tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' | head -c 13 ; echo
but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was happening with </dev/urandom redirecting input or ; echo apparently doing something with the returned status? –
So the question becomes, which is more readable? to me it’s the one with the (technically) unnecessary cat.
Coincidentally, I just saw this today: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/put-down-pipe
Is
catoverused in CLI examples, especially in stack-overflow answers? Yes. Is the raw processing power consumed bycatgoing to negate your productivity? No. Are the clever work-arounds people invent to avoid using cat at all really worth it? Probably not, but it looks cooler than something more readable than just using cat…So, the example I was thinking of when I wrote this goes like so…
Somebody on stack overflow wanted to generate passwords in bash, somebody suggested this solution:
another user suggested this method to avoid using cat:
but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was happening with
</dev/urandomredirecting input or; echoapparently doing something with the returned status? –So the question becomes, which is more readable? to me it’s the one with the (technically) unnecessary cat.