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If you’re working with a lot of data you probably want to pipe it into head anyway, initially, so

<file head -n50 | whatever

Can be the starting command. When you no longer need the head there, just get rid of “head |”.

Although I agree that the pointing out of “useless cat” is usually not particularly useful or constructive.

Using head when there's lots of data make sense, but I really don't see any advantage to avoiding useless cat. Useless cat is way faster to type and make additions to. I sort of get the feeling that 'useless cat' is really just a fun copypasta kinda like when people like post "I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it..."

It's still good to be aware about `useless cat`, to save some CPU and I/O, when converting one liners into scripts.

Rather than using head and worrying about the size of the file, it is easier to simply use "useless" cat then ctrl-c the stream of data that comes out.

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