[ProgSoc] cat file | prog [was Re: Asking for help from the sed heads]

["Dennis L. Clark" <dbugger@nospam.vnet.net>]

(I don't know who wrote this, as it's a quote of a quote...)
| > 
| > Just copy the lines u want into a text file called tmp.1  then run
| > 
| > cat tmp.1 |awk '{print "#include ", $*}' > tmp.2
| > 

Let's ignore the syntax error in the script for a moment.

Does anyone know if we have anything in TFM which berates people who use
"cat file" at the head of a shell pipeline? Because we should.

For those not in the know, the above one-liner is more cluefully written
as:

    awk '{print "#include ", $*}' < tmp.1 > tmp.2

or even better:

    awk '{print "#include ", $*}' tmp.1 > tmp.2

Some of you may think that complaining about this is being particularly
anal, but it's these avoidable inefficiencies that give Unix a bad name
("To get this to work in Unix, I need to launch 50,000 processes!").
Another example: on one host I found a set of shell scripts which had
many lines like this in them:

    var2=`echo $var1`

No prizes for those who can figure out the clueful way of doing this.

Cheers,

-- 
       Dennis Clark       dbugger@nospam.debian.org       PGP/MIME spoken here
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
    simple system that works.

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