awww what's a cat without a head and a tail?

it’s just a natural start to a pipeline

So close! you have to do cat < foo.txt :-) (/s)

If it's really long, I use less , because it breaks it up into navigable pages instead of filling your entire buffer. :)

Never knew about just using < though! Cool!

Admittedly I still use cat for this.

This also works too, but it's more verbose:

echo "$(<foo.txt)"

It's mentioned in the Bash man pages:

The command substitution $(cat file) can be replaced by the equivalent but faster $(< file).

EDIT: I was just informed that simply <foo.txt works too.

You can use less. There are also specialized ones for that purpose like bat.

I know, but I just wanted to mention this since a lot of new Linux users end up using cat this way :)

< file.txt grep thing also works.

Reverse chronological order, mostly

tac log.txt |head # would give you newest first

no good for sort because sort already supports -r

no need it for tail on large files because tail already skips to the end.

I do a lot of impromptu bash to sus crap out of logs.

when you're balls deep in

cat log|grep -v foo| rev|cut -f 1-3 -d \ | |rev

Sometimes tac comes in clutch.

whatis cat?