Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewprock | Hacker News Reader

At the very least ag does not handle large files. It bails with an error after the file gets too big.

It can crash, on large files, particularly on macOS because mmap is disabled by default.

But that should go away by streaming the file. e.g.

    cat haystack | ag 'Needle'

    ag Needle < haystack

No need for cat

Your version requires fewer keystrokes. It's also mental model-breaking and un-Unixy. Pipes, my good man! Pipe everything to everything!

How come knowing how to redirect stdin is un-Unixy?

Pipes are a good tool, and so are many others. Having a good command of other basic mechanisms of the shell is going to hugely pay off, try to have a brief shot if you want [0].

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Redirecti...

No. Useless Use of Cat is sufficiently unidiomatic that there is an award for it:

http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html

No. Being smug doesn't make someone right. Especially when the smug person is advocating a special case. Special cases are inherently wrong, even when they "save" a process.

If the most logical syntax is

  grep needle haystack

Surely

  grep needle < haystack

is much closer to that form than

  cat haystack | grep needle

Mm, input redirection with the shell is the very epitomy of basic Unix functionality.

< haystack ag Needle

Will work too, and now it's in the logical order.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com