@Anachron@fosstodon.org
In some cases letting the program read the file directly instead of spawning cat and piping its output is preferrable, but in most cases it would be precipitate optimization — always a mistake, clarity is more important. That's a valid point indeed!
We're talking shell scripts here, any optimization in absolute most cases would be ephemeral… Unless it's something like using [START..END] sequence to pass thousands of filenames as parameters instead of using a proper loop of course 🤭