[TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976)

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 7:44 PM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've long been fascinated by the prevalence of
>
>    cat file | process
>
> and think of it as a sort of triumph of the model. Pipes are more natural
> than redirection as a human interface.
>

This has always struck me as particularly elegant in scripts. Consider:

    cat "$@" | whatever

(Or you may prefer `cat $* | whatever`)

Now one's script can take any number of file arguments or stdin, even if
the filter does not.

        - Dan C.

On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 11:30 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
>>
>
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