Is this a useless use of "cat"?
I cannot figure out how to make the following work without using cat. I am not worried about the forked process or whatever, it just doesn't bother me:
$ printf "<format specification string>" $(cat source-file.txt)
Is there a better way?
+3
Jamie
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2 answers
Yes. You can accomplish the same thing without creating a new process for cat
, with:
$ printf "<format specification string>" $(<source-file.txt)
+7
Adam liss
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Even if it is a useless use of cat, I would still use cat
to output the contents of the file instead <
in this case, because it precludes the possibility of overwriting the input file by overriding the typo ( >
) symbol
0
Alex
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