I interpreted <<double up arrow>> to mean the correct solution was “way higher” than my guess, not that my guess was “way higher”.

The wording is potentially confusing, though.

Good luck checking out the stitching on Amazon. Even if you can see it in a picture, the item in the picture might not be the one you’re getting.

And good luck finding “no brand” options in a Brick and Mortar store.

Speaking for myself, the first form is more natural- even if it’s a useless cat, because I’m always cat-ing files to see their structure. Then progressively tacking on different transforms. And then finally putting it in whatever I want as output.

It’s so ingrained, I’m more likely than not to just write it out that way even when I know exactly what I’m doing from the onset.

Yes, this iterative procedure is often why "useless" cats get put into it. It's a very effective way of processing regular text information.

e.g.

I need to grab some info from textfile.txt to use as arguments to a function.

cat textfile.txt

looks like its comma delimited.

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 2-5

ah, its the third and fourth column i need

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep '123456'

perfect

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep 123456 | tr , ' '

myfunc $(cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep 123456 | tr , ' ')

> cat textfile.txt

> looks like its comma delimited.

Interesting; why wouldn't you use `head`? Who knows how big textfile.txt is?

generally, speaking, if you don't have an idea of how big the file is, or it would take up too much real-estate on your terminal window, sure. 100%. It was just an example.

lot's of times we sort of know what we are working with, but don't remember the particulars especially

Don't forget to pipe head into 'cat -v'... that text file could contain _anything_!

I really recommend folks use "less" over cat, especially keyboard oriented folks. Different terminal emulators don't always have the scroll behavior I want, not do they always allow me to search the file I'm looking at. "less" does all those things, in nearly every environment no matter the terminal emulator, and has other wonderful options to boot (chop long lines so they don't wrap can be nice for logs, line numbers can be VITAL, etc).

I still uselessly use cat though, it's such a nice way to build a pipeline.

I hate that when I use `less`, then quit, the output goes away.

You can run "less -X" for that, but it may have other problems depending on how you use less (e.g. scrolling up, etc.)

My useless cat is that I always use `cat file | less` when I could just `less file`.

I've been typing cat for over 25 years. Old habits die hard.

Thank you for pointing this out! This is much safer.

`file` will tell you too

Won't tell you the delimiter.

I've been using bat as a cat replacement for a while now. It includes paging, syntax highlighting, line numbers, and is generally very performant.

https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

As a scientist who cares about reproducibility, the big difference between the "useless cat" and providing the input file name on the command line is that, in the latter case, the program can capture that file name and reproduce it. That is harder when using stdin.

Many of my programs and scripts start output with the line: # cmd arg1 arg2 arg3 ...

and simply echo back lines that start with '#'. That way, I have an internal record of the program that was run and the data file that was read (as well as previous parts of the analysis chain).

And, 'R' ignores lines starting with '#', so the record is there, but does not affect later analyses.

You could consider

    < foo.json jq | pbcopy

If you're using zsh, you can just replace any instance of

    $ cat somefile ...

with

    $ <somefile ...

For bash, this only works if you have at least one `|`.

I did this last time I saw it come up and was surprised! Doing it makes perfect sense in hindsight. Neato!

A lot of my side projects end up being:

“I want to learn how to do X, but I have no idea what that’s going to take.”

And I end up just coding a logical step and if I don’t know what to do go research it, realize I did something wrong 3 steps ago and then either revert or abandon depending on my current motivation.

I’ve tried before to create a “game plan” before but most of the time there’s so much that I don’t know that I don’t know that it’s either impossible to make that plan or once I do, that plan ends up being wrong anyways.

As such it always feels like I’m doing side projects wrong. But since they’re more learning endeavors more than actually trying to launch a product maybe that’s fine?

I think it's absolutely fine. You do something you enjoy and you learn new things.

I think if you actually _want_ to finish something you finish it.