The beauty of cat is that streams are the universal interface.
Program A might accept a file as the last positional arg. Program B might accept it as a named arg, where the name/flag could be anything from --input or -f or --file etc.
But a program will read from STDIN, which all good unix programs do, then piping cat into it works every time. I can write the cat foo.txt part before I even know what command I'm piping it into.
Program A might accept a file as the last positional arg. Program B might accept it as a named arg, where the name/flag could be anything from --input or -f or --file etc.
But a program will read from STDIN, which all good unix programs do, then piping cat into it works every time. I can write the cat foo.txt part before I even know what command I'm piping it into.