good-cat

This cat hates pipes.

good-cat is a cat that can't be piped. If you try, it refuses and exits with an error code. This way, no uses of good-cat are unnecessary [citation needed].

Explanation

Some people think all cats should hate pipes, but the cats on any platform you find will go through pipes just fine. For people that can't stand cats in pipes, they can use good-cat instead.

Antipipeists will tell you that it creates a unneeded process, it stops the piped-to process from getting random access to the contents of the file, and it abuses the original purpose of cat. To those people I say: who cares?

If the random access vs. stream-of-bytes problem is measured as an actual issue, then sure, change it. If your platform is actually having issues related to too many processes because of excess of cat-into-pipe, then yeah stop doing that. I wager that neither of these problems happen often.

But hey, if someone's really set on complaining, you can show them a good-cat they'll love.

Usage

For best results, set alias cat="good-cat" in your shell configuration file.

$ # A bad cat
$ cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | awk '{print $1}'
$ # A good cat
$ good-cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | awk '{print $1}'
$ # DOESN'T WORK!
$ # So you do this instead.
$ awk '{print $1}' /var/log/apache2/access.log

Contributing

good-cat is maximally good and feature-complete [citation needed].

License

good-cat is MIT licensed. See the LICENSE.md file for the license text.