[trapperkeeper74]

And prefer redirection to cat.

    whatever < file.txt 

not

    cat file.txt | whatever

Also, there is no need for - or z on GNU tar in t or x modes:

    tar tf whatever.tgz
    tar tf whatever.tar.bz2
    tar tf whatever.txz
    ...

    tar xf whatever.tar.gz
    tar xf whatever.tar.Z
    ...

all work just fine

[TorKlingberg]

I know whatever < file.txt is slightly more efficient, but there is value is keeping things going left to right with pipes in between. It makes it easy to insert a grep or sort, or swap out a part.

[veddan]

    <file.txt grep foo | sort

[BenjiWiebe]

Ok, if that actually works, that's amazing. Wow.

[vram22]

It works because of the general principle that I mentioned here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15249370

The shell (not the command) is the one expanding those metacharacters, so (within limits), in:

cmd < file

or

< file cmd

where you put that piece (< file) on the line does not matter, because the actual command cmd never sees the redirection at all - it is done [1] by the time the command starts. The cmd command will only see the command line arguments (other than redirections) and options (arguments that start with a dash). Even expansion of $ and other sigils (unless quoted) happens before the command starts.

[1] I.e. the shell and kernel set up the standard input of the command to be connected to the file opened for reading (in the case of < file).

[joombaga]

Oh cool. Didn't know this was possible.

[traviscj]

I prefer cat because > vs < is an easy typo to make but one clobbers the file. Happy to pay the performance penalty as insurance against that.

[vram22]

You can use the bash setting called noclobber to prevent such accidental deletion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clobbering