It’s less relatable now, and the technology was fucking stupid to begin with, but: Imagine printing out a document and feeding the sheets into a fax machine instead of just sending the file directly to the machine.
Or using a cassette tape adapter to play music from your phone through a stereo system when that system has a built-in Aux port you could plug directly into (“Useless Use Of Cassette?”).
cat’ing into grep, and a handful of other programs people commonly pipe into from cat, is pointless when grep can be called directly against a file. cat is being run for no reason; a useless use of cat (uuoc). It means fuckall for most people today but I imagine it could’ve been an actual concern when hardware was much more limited and multiple users were connecting to a single system.
It’s less relatable now, and the technology was fucking stupid to begin with, but: Imagine printing out a document and feeding the sheets into a fax machine instead of just sending the file directly to the machine.
Or using a cassette tape adapter to play music from your phone through a stereo system when that system has a built-in Aux port you could plug directly into (“Useless Use Of Cassette?”).
cat’ing into grep, and a handful of other programs people commonly pipe into from cat, is pointless when grep can be called directly against a file. cat is being run for no reason; a useless use of cat (uuoc). It means fuckall for most people today but I imagine it could’ve been an actual concern when hardware was much more limited and multiple users were connecting to a single system.