[Tepix]

Tobik already wrote it

but here's todays Useless Use of Cat Award http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html

[e12e]

Well, sometimes using cat is faster, as I discovered to my surprise recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610

But in that case one could probably say that Gnu awk is just not very good at input handling (as Mawk doesn't appear to benefit from an extra "cat").