On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 7:44 PM Rob Pike wrote: > I've long been fascinated by the prevalence of > > cat file | process > > and think of it as a sort of triumph of the model. Pipes are more natural > than redirection as a human interface. > This has always struck me as particularly elegant in scripts. Consider: cat "$@" | whatever (Or you may prefer `cat $* | whatever`) Now one's script can take any number of file arguments or stdin, even if the filter does not. - Dan C. On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 11:30 AM Dave Horsfall wrote: > >> On Thu, 3 Dec 2020, Larry McVoy wrote: >> >> > Wasn't there a version that was >> > >> > cat whatever ^ wc -l >> >> Sort of pipe-related, but one thing that really gets my goat is the >> inefficient redundancy in "cat file | process" when "process < file" will >> suffice (and I'll bet that I'm not alone). >> >> And yes, "^" preceded "|" for reasons discussed later in this thread. >> >> -- Dave >> >