cat is misunderstood a lot. The purpose of cat is to combine multiple files together (it's literally short for "concatenate"), like cat *.log to combine all log files together.

If you're just using it for a single file, then you should just redirect the file to stdin. These two command lines behave similarly:

cat foo.txt | some-command

some-command < foo.txt

For head, tail, grep and some other commands, you can just pass in the file name directly as an argument (e.g. grep whatever foo.txt).

[–] qqq@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You'll see cat FILE | all the time because it's just a natural start to a pipeline. You cat FILE to see the content unfiltered before filtering it with further commands.

[–] BasedMaquisEddington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 day ago

it’s just a natural start to a pipeline

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