[TUHS] On computerese

[Andy Kosela]

On Monday, September 16, 2024, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:

> cat is capable of endless discussion.
>
> cat thing | cat otherthing doesn't do what (some) people think.
> cat thing | cat otherthing /dev/stdin does, but there's an ordering
> point to be made.
> cat thing | cat < otherthing /dev/stdin makes the ordering point. and
> the number of lines seen.
>
> the role of the shell in marshalling the IO and determining what is
> opened, when, truncated is another pitfall that seems to escape
> people. "I thought the commands ran left to right" when your first
> command < something and your final command > something
>
> like others, my use of cat is reflexive. I know perfectly well I could
> solve the whole problem in awk or sed, I still construct sequences to
> use sed to edit the lines, and awk to extract the fields in LSWP
> denoted counts. we're speaking english and say "comme ci comme ca" and
> nobody blinks, it's the same in shell. codeswitching!
>

I have always admired one letter commands in ed(1) and during the years
constructed my own personal perfect Unix dictionary with most often used
commands as one letter abbreviations. For cat(1) I have always used 'c'
(cee) which also denotes one of its main functions.

Grep(1) is 'g', vi(1) is 'v', etc.

It makes typing a little faster, at least for me.

--Andy
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