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This post is part of my Today I learned series in which I share all my web development learnings.

Today I came across this tweet by Safia Abdalla. It showed that you can use the cat command to quickly add content to a file (cat - >> foo.txt). The way it works is that you can directly write to stdin until you hit ^D or ^C.

So I opened the manual for the cat command and wanted to see what else is in there. One sentence suprised me though.

If file is a single dash (`-') or absent, cat reads from the standard input.

You can make the snippet even shorter! ๐Ÿ˜ฒ

$ cat - >> foo.txt
# is the same as
$ cat >> bar.txt

That's cool!

I also discovered that you can use cat and stdin right in between files and concat them (you have to use ^D โ€“ ^C doesn't work then). ๐ŸŽ‰

$ cat 1.txt - 3.txt > all.txt

I'm not sure if I'll ever need this functionality but it's always good to know some shell tricks. Safia shares a lot more CLI tricks so you should definitely check these out.

Cat stdin magic

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About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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