<inasprec...@disroot.org> wrote: > Why is cat -v considered bad? I see that people often bring up > this particular example as a way to illustrate bad extensions, but > what exactly makes it so?
Hi, by design cat is not supposed to be used for printing stuff to the terminal. The fact that it does in the first place is a sheer coincidence due to how redirection and stdout works. Therefore anything that tries to alter the output of cat, like the -v option does is violating the unix philosophy. The reason people use it as example is because it's the most simple. At least that's my interpretation, though I did not do any specific research regarding to cat history. If you have a better explanation feel free to correct me. Regards, Kyryl.
