".GIF" files

[Ed Horch]

In article <993 at gnosys.svle.ma.us> gst at gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo) writes:
>I've never understood why some people insist on using cat(1) to get stuff
>into the standard input of the lead program in a pipeline.  I claim that:
>
>	cat a | b | c
>
>is entirely equivalent in result to:
>
>	b < a | c

That's correct, but notationally, setting up a long pipeline using
only pipes is, for some people, more intuitive than throwing a re-
direction in there, since the order "do something with a, then b,
then c" is maintained.

There may be a performance cost due to creating an additional
process for "cat a", but a smart shell will know how to short-
cut around that.

-Ed