I cat files into programs that can take their inputs both from stdin and a given file, although I know people call that "useless". I do it because it makes my pipelines more uniform, by keeping the direction of data flow from left to right. It also makes it easier to insert additional processing steps, or changing the input from a file to the output of a program. Maybe I'm a fool for writing Bash like Forth, but I prefer it that way.
>Beyond other benefits, the input redirection forms allow command to perform random access on the file, whereas the cat examples do not. This is because the redirection form opens the file as the stdin file descriptor which command can fully access, while the cat form simply provides the data as a stream of bytes.
commands like `sort` are optimized to handle large input file
and how would you do `grep -l 'foo' *.txt` if you use `cat`?
or `awk 'NR==FNR{a[$1]; next} $1 in a' file1 file2`
Awesome product, I'm using it at work and it's incredibly fast. Configuration is easy, documentation is clear. The systemd unit provided in the repo is insane, all the latest security and isolation stuff are in it, a great inpiration for writing good systemd units.
