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Interview With the Author of "Mastering Cat"

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the waste-of-words dept.

Shlomi Fish writes "O'Reilly is publishing a new book titled 'Mastering cat,' about the UNIX 'cat' command. Here is an interview O'Reilly-Net conducted with the author about it. Read it to see if this book should be part of your bookshelf of technical books."

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Damn. by castorvx · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was hoping for a manual to help me read the icanhascheezburger comments.

    1. Re:Damn. by momerath2003 · · Score: 4, Informative

      That would be "lolcat," not cat. And here is a page to help you.

      --
      I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
  2. Re:I just /usr/bin/cat my coffee everywhere. by steveha · · Score: 5, Informative

    As an aside, remember kids, don't do this:

    cat foo | grep bar

    It is bad Unix!

    Eh, it's not that big a deal.

    Yes, you can simply say "grep bar foo" and it will have the same effect with less typing. But it's really not that big a deal, and there are times when I would do this. Usually it is because I'm doing something like this:

    shell_script foo | grep bar

    And I'm not getting the results I expect; then I might swap out the shell script part for cat, to help me debug. It's easier to type

    cat !*

    or even

    ^shell_script^cat

    than to retype the whole command.

    As long as you know what you are doing, build the command line any way you like. The computer exists to serve you, not the other way around...

    Now someone will mod me (-1, No Sense of Humor) or (-1, Beating the Joke Into the Ground). But I regret nothing! Nothing, I tell you.

    steveha

    --
    lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely