On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 7:59 AM, Joshua Landau <jos...@landau.ws> wrote: > On 14 August 2013 02:20, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: >> Ned Batchelder wrote: >>> >>> Everyone: this program seems to be a direct and misguided transliteration >>> from a bash script. >> >> Not a particularly well-written bash script, either -- >> it's full of superfluous uses of 'cat'. > > What's wrong with cat? Sure it's superfluous but what makes it *bad*? > Personally I often prefer the pipe "cat x | y" form to "x < y"... or > "< y x".
What's the use of it, in that situation? Why not simply use redirection? (Though you have the letters backward; "cat y | x" would be the equivalent of your others. Typo, I assume.) You're forking a process that achieves nothing, if your cat has just one argument. Of course, there ARE many good uses for cat. If you give it multiple arguments, or if you have arguments that modify the output on the way through (eg "cat -n"), then it's not the same as redirection. And some programs behave differently if stdout is a tty, so the quickest way to get the porcelain version of something is to append "|cat" to the command. Or maybe you need to retrieve something that only root can read, so you use "sudo cat /x/y/z|somescript". But if you could spell it "x < y", then why not do so? ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
