cat — file concatenation

Abuse of cat

If you find yourself about to use cat in an ebuild, stop and reconsider. It is almost always unnecessary.

All usages in the form cat somefile | somecommand are silly and should be eschewed. The form somecommand < somefile does the same thing, and doesn't involve an extra fork and a pipe. With many standard utilities the somecommand somefile form will work as well.

Using foo=$(cat somefile) to place the contents of a file into the variable foo is also unnecessary. The command foo=$(<somefile) works just as well and doesn't require a fork. Similarly, cat file | xargs cmd and xargs cmd < file can be replaced by cmd $(<file).

Finally, cat foo > bar, where foo is a single file, can usually be replaced by cp -f foo bar.

Here documents

On the other hand, cat is exceptionally useful for so-called "here" documents, such as the following example from the sendmail-8.13.3 ebuild:

src_install() {
	# ...
	cat <<- EOF > "${D}/etc/mail/trusted-users" || die
		# trusted-users - users that can send mail as others without a warning
		# apache, mailman, majordomo, uucp are good candidates
	EOF
	# ...
}

In this example cat is used inside src_install to create the ${D}/etc/mail/trusted-users file. Specifically, the new file will comprise the lines between the cat line and the line with EOF in the ebuild.

The funny hyphen in <<- is a >=bash-2.05 syntax that tells cat to strip leading tabs (please note that when you want to copy the example, you have to replace the leading spaces with tabs), so that, as Azarah puts it, "we won't have the ebuilds looking from space effect". For such small files as the example above, a set of here documents is more elegant, and easier to maintain, than the equivalent bunch of files floating about in ${FILESDIR} would be. If for some reason you need to preserve leading whitespace, then simply use << instead of <<- to get the desired effect.