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).

[–] lokalhorst@feddit.org 14 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (5 children)

If I just want to look at the file, is there a better way than cat foo.txt? I guess I can't just do < foo.txt

[–] TwilightKiddy@scribe.disroot.org 1 points 7 hours ago

You can use less. There are also specialized ones for that purpose like bat.

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