considered harmful

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/
>2013
>using harmful software

>>46
Blocking until you see a full line of input doesn't "break the fundamental pipe abstraction". It's actually a great example of how the abstraction works - read tokenizes input so the next process in the pipeline doesn't have to.

The -v switch is what's ``considered harmful'' in the title. cat concatenates files, so having a flag like -v that turns it into a filter makes no sense.

>>46
Pretty sure UNIX has handled text line-by-line for decades. Run cat, type ``hello'', hit Return, it prints ``hello''.

The original ``cat -v'' paper (hosted on the site at http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf) recommends writing a separate program, vis, whose job it is to print non-visible characters. This way it can be used in conjunction with any program, not just cat.