The general consensus on “Useless use of cat”

catcommand linepipeunix

When I pipe multiple unix commands such as grep, sed, tr etc. I tend to specify the input file that is being processed using cat. So something like cat file | grep ... | awk ... | sed ... .

But recently after a couple of comments left on my answers indicating that this was a useless use of cat, I thought I would ask the question here.

I looked up the issue and came across Wikipedia's article on UUOC and The Useless Use of Cat Award and it seems to me that the arguments made are from the perspective of efficiency.

The closest question I came across here was this one: Is it wasteful to call cat? – but it's not quite what I'm asking.

I guess what the UUOC camp suggest is to use cmd1 args < file | cmd2 args | cmd3 .. or if the command has an option to read from file then to pass in the file as an argument.

But to me cat file | cmd1 ... | cmd2 seems much easier to read and understand. I don't have to remember different ways of sending input files to different commands, and the process flows logically from left to right. First input, then the first process … and so on.

Am I failing to understand what arguments are being made about the useless use of cat? I understand that if I'm running a cron job that runs every 2 seconds that does a lot of processing, then in that case cat might be wasteful. But otherwise what's the general consensus on the use of cat?

Best Answer

It's useless in the sense that using it like that doesn't accomplish anything the other, possibly more efficient options can't (i.e. producing proper results).

But cat is way more powerful than just cat somefile. Consult man cat or read what I wrote in this answer. But if you absolutely positively only need the contents of a single file, you might get some performance advantage from not using cat to get at the file contents.

Regarding readability, this depends on your personal tastes. I like cating files into other commands for the same reason, especially if the performance aspects are negligible.

It also depends on what you're scripting. If it's your own shell and convenience methods for your desktop machine, nobody except you will care. If you stumble upon a case where the next tool in the chain would be better off being able to seek, and distribute this as a frequently used piece of software on some minimal Linux system on a low-performance router or similar device with real limits on processing ability, that's different. It always depends on the context.

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