[TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)

[George Michaelson]

I also get this, but there is a part of this which is about the
history of your command stream as a history of thinking.

cat file
<blurs past>

(sigh)

cat file | more

not more file. because you are heading to
cat file | cut -d, -f1,2 | real-job

yes, the cat is redundant. but syntactically it is like  (a b) + vs
plus(a,b) its not the functional order of the atoms for execution, its
how you "pronounce" the work you are doing inside your head..
expressed through your fingers.

The cost of the cat is really not big. the cost of re-framing your
command to  cmd < thing  is sometimes higher in brain cost. Brains are
expensive.

On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 10:30 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 3 Dec 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> > Wasn't there a version that was
> >
> >       cat whatever ^ wc -l
>
> Sort of pipe-related, but one thing that really gets my goat is the
> inefficient redundancy in "cat file | process" when "process < file" will
> suffice (and I'll bet that I'm not alone).
>
> And yes, "^" preceded "|" for reasons discussed later in this thread.
>
> -- Dave