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

[Ben Scott]

On 10/4/07, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
>    sudo cat /var/log/maillog | grep -i syslang
>
> so it's an easy habit to get into.  There's no reason to run grep as
> root in that example.  grep might be [read: is] buggy.

  Well, cat(1) *is* a GNU program, after all.  It probably has a
couple buffer overflows in it, too.  ;-)

> It's also conceptually very straightforward.

  So is

	< infile foo | bar | baz > outfile

... don't you think?

> And if you wrote the thing in assembly instead of a shell script it'd
> be even more efficient!

  No.  Efficiency is about ROI, not about absolutes.  Writing it in
assembly would take longer.  On the other hand, it actually takes more
keystrokes to do this:

	cat infile | foo | bar | baz > outfile

than it is to do this:

	< infile foo | bar | baz > outfile

  I mean, my gosh, with cat, you're using *twice* as many keystrokes
as you need to!  ;-)

  Of course, it's a fair bet that more effort has been spent arguing
about UUOC than would ever be saved by eliminating UUOC.  But hey.
"Repetition is the very soul of the 'net."  ;-)

-- Ben