I’ve run across comments regarding useless use of cat twice today. However, after reading the linked Wikipedia entry, it feels more like a way to give someone an ego trip than a truly more useful alternative.

The Wikipedia article even concedes that cat might be better:

> A cat written with UUOC might still be preferred for readability reasons, as reading a piped stream left-to-right might be easier to conceptualize.[10] Also, one wrong use of the redirection symbol ">" instead of "<" (often adjacent on keyboards) may permanently delete the content of a file, in other words clobbering, and one way to avoid this is to use cat with pipes.

I‘ll happily continue to “abuse cat” going forward and sleep perfectly well.