cat pipe. Was: Sony audio (MSV), and LAME is lame

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Thu Oct 4 10:21:20 EDT 2007


On 10/4/07, Steven W. Orr <steveo at syslang.net> wrote:
>> cat inputfile | lame -r -m m -b 24 -s 22.05 -- > output
>
> I see this all the time and for the life of me I just don't get it.

UUOC.  http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html

> when they can just say
>
> lame < file

  Even better, one can also do this:

	< infile  foo | bar | baz > outfile

to keep the pipeline in natural order.

  I do sometimes wonder why, with all the other crap in bash, they
haven't just made it "optimize" calls like "cat file | something" to
"< file something".

  Another related trick you can do in bash:  You can include the
contents of any file at any point where you can do variable expansion.
 For example, instead of

	for i in $( xargs < argfile ) ; whatever ; done

... one can do ...

	for i in $( < argfile ) ; whatever ; done

-- Ben


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