cat as a shell builtin

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 08:48:32 +0000

Recently i blogged about how to get a process list if you aren’t able to fork any processes . Also a process list is allways handy, i allways find cat a very usefull tool too. But as you might have noticed cat is not a shell builtin. So everytime cat is called a new process needs to be forked. In case you can’t fork processes it’s a problem, and even if you can fork them you may save resources by “creating” a shell builtin cat.
So lets do this,
open your .profile for usage with your user only or /etc/profile for global usage (You may also use your .bashrc or .zshrc instead).
Append the following lines to the file:

#pseudo bash builtin cat function
function cat { echo “$(< $1)" }
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Function Built With Builtins on ohneKontur – der Blog

cat as a shell builtin