[colug-432] Nice Plain Text Columns and Avoiding NIH: expand: not

[Stephen Potter]

On 8/29/2011 12:39 PM, Rob Funk wrote:
> A lot of times I'll write scripts that look something like:
> cat foo |\
>    filter --somehow |\
>    another-filter --some-other-way |\
>    more-filtering --with-more-options
>
> And it's nice to be able to easily vary the source (e.g. cat, echo, curl)
> separately from the filters, with a direct pipeline from beginning to end.

If you're chaining multiple commands in a script, I can see the utility 
of having the initial cat there so the input doesn't get completely 
lost.  That's actually one of the first really good reasons I've heard 
for using cat in a pipe!  But, for CLI usage, how often do you really do 
more than two commands?

filter foo | other-filter

-spp