filters

[Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR]

As quoted from <1990Dec15.175917.27136 at comm.wang.com> by lws at comm.wang.com (Lyle Seaman):
+---------------
| dylan at ibmpcug.co.uk (Matthew Farwell) writes:
| >Sorry, but I find typing 'cat foobar' quite a bit easier than typing
| >'dd if=foobar of=/dev/tty bs=512'. Strange, I know, but its this little
| >idiosyncracy of mine.
| > [ ... etc ... ]
| 
| So write an alias or a shell script if you want that special functionality.
+---------------

Hold it.  *cat* is user bloat?!  I won't argue about cat -v, but:

... pipeline ... | cat header - trailer | ... rest of pipeline ...

So what "more basic" utility does this for me?  I thought cat *was* the basic
utility for this.

User interface bloat is one thing; eliminating a basic utility in favor of a
different filter is something completely different.  (I would argue that "dd"
should not have "if" and "of" because shell redirection or "cat" will do that.
But it must be remembered that dd was designed for IBM-heads.)

++Brandon
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