On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 11:55:52AM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Mon 25 Jul 2005 11:37, Proinnsias Breathnach wrote:
> > > I think "ls | cat"
> >
> > And today's "Useless Use of cat Award" goes to ...
>> Why so?
> I could have said "redirecting or piping the output" but that seemed simpler.
Mainly because, while that is the default behaviour of ls (single col on
pipe/redirect) it can be overridden. That and there's usually a way of
redirecting without using cat :)
>> I don't think normal people ever say "ls -1".
> It shows excessive devotion to man pages.
Quite possibly not :) ... indeed normal people don't use Unix/Linux
anyway !!
ls -1 is a much nicer way of doing it in scripts for example -
especially better than `ls | cat` because it makes the script easier for
'future generations' to read. In maths, problems are usually (aiui)
'boiled down' to the simplest expression (4/8 -> 1/2 etc). Likewise in
computing / scripting, it's sensible (if not strictly necessary any
more) to conserve resources / processes.
Oh ... that and no-one had got the UUocA for a while !
P
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