The "loop and a half"

[Michael Torrie]

On 10/06/2017 07:24 AM, bartc wrote:
> On 06/10/2017 14:11, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
>> I regularly use at least cat, wc and od this way (plus a few of my own
>> utilities like utf8dump). I'm sure I've used sort this way, too, though
>> rather rarely. I usually don't type the input but paste it in,
> 
> Exactly. Probably no one ever uses these programs with actual live input 
> with the possibility of uncorrectable errors getting through.

I regularly use cat in an interactive way. Most Unix users do.

cat >somefile.txt
sometext
^D

It's a very fast way of moving stuff from the clipboard to a file
without having to fire up an editor.

I'm not sure a prompt would benefit very much here, since this is such a
common operation once you learn it.

In MS-DOS to create a file you do "copy con: file" and then you also get
a blinking cursor with no prompt. Yet this was just something we did
with MS-DOS.  Not sure a prompt would have gained much.