[0]: > > Did running a ‘cat’ really take more time in '95 than fiddling around the ‘<file’?

> It does now for a sufficiently large file. And it's even more extreme when the recipient can do things with a file that it can't do with a pipe.

Processes doing things differently with a file than they would with a pipe is one of the reasons why I default to `cat foo | …`

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23344655