Will McDonald wrote:
On 14/03/07, John Summerfield debian@herakles.homelinux.org wrote:
Will McDonald wrote: It might be quicker, but that doesn't make it more efficient;-)
And that's why I mentioned it'd be wise to test :) I know things are never cut 'n dried and it depends on log makeup, datasets and whatnot. There's always dozens of ways to do things and no one way is perfect.
Or even best for everyone.
I often "evolve" my commandlines (I commonly use one that's 500+ characters long) and if I don't start with a cat I often wish I did:-/
I can't think of a single instance of needing to 'cat | somethingelse' unless 'somethingelse' doesn't accept STDIN unless explicitly told to. I could obviously be missing some corner case or just be ill educated? :)
cat /var/log/messages | grep is more easily changed to include another file cat /var/log/messages{.0,} | grep than grep cat /var/log/messages to grep -h cat /var/log/messages{.0,} | grep -h Note, I'm often typing through a modem and have to contend with unpredictable response times.
Even worse is changing to include compressed files: (gunzip -dc /var/log/messages.{4,3,2,1}.gz;cat /var/log/messages{.0,})\ | grep
I need to do this kind of thing fairly often.