Also known as cat abuse.

If I just want to look at the file, is there a better way than cat foo.txt? I guess I can't just do < foo.txt

You'll see cat FILE | all the time because it's just a natural start to a pipeline. You cat FILE to see the content unfiltered before filtering it with further commands.

yeah sure but the command is literally written for the humor.

Fair, but in general I find it way more useful to use cat for piping.

In most cases I'll do something like

cat file | program
cat file | program | grep
cat file | program | grep | cut

This gets more complicated if the file is at the end of the command.

I still like doing cat file.txt | grep thing because I often re-run it to find something else like cat file.txt | grep thing2 - and if I do that with grep, the pattern sits awkwardly in the middle instead of at the end

Huh. ... I could have swore there was a woman. I even package searched, even in overlays... no woman.

digit 20260807 tyson gentoo /home/digit % whereis woman
woman:
digit 20260807 tyson gentoo /home/digit % which woman
which: no woman in (/bedrock/cross/pin/bin:/bedrock/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/snap/bin:/home/digit/bin:/usr/games/bin:/usr/games:/bedrock/strata/devuan/usr/libexec/xscreensaver:/home/digit/.cargo/bin:/bedrock/cross/bin)
digit 20260807 tyson gentoo /home/digit % apropos woman
woman: nothing appropriate.

digit 20260807 tyson gentoo /home/digit % man cry
No manual entry for cry
digit 20260807 tyson gentoo /home/digit % whereis cry
cry:

No woman.

No cry.

$ touch woman
touch: cannot touch 'woman': Permission denied

ohhh let me check it out lol

yeah I just checked it out it's cute

~$ which bat
~$ bat man

I'm scared to run that.

Is that like some kind of fork bomb?

Or is it just a tubular cat?

of course look meow meow so loud

which cat