this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
348 points (97.8% liked)

Programmer Humor

32620 readers
1408 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

ahh

~$ which cat
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lokalhorst@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

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

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 points 4 hours ago

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!

[–] dan@upvote.au 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] not_IO@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

how in the world is this not a useless use of echo and equivalent to <foo.txt

[–] dan@upvote.au 5 points 1 day ago

OK, TIL you can just do <foo.txt. I didn't think that worked. Thanks!

[–] mote@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 day ago

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

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