tac VS regexp-cut

cat just regurgitates the contents of the file, but the resulting piped fd is non-seekable. Since almost every command that can operate on a file from stdin can also operate on the file by name/path, at best this is just a needless invocation of a process (i.e. `tv foo.csv` should have been used instead of `cat foo.csv | tv`) - if the app in question can't handle paths, then you can have the shell pipe the file into it instead (e.g. `tv < foo.csv`). At worst, the recipient program would need to buffer the entire contents of the input if it needs to perform non-sequential operations on the source data - this is the case with things like `tac` that need to seek to the end of the input (see https://github.com/neosmart/tac for how `cat foo | tac` requires buffering but both `tac foo` and even `tac < foo` don't).

I use a lot of CLI tools, but haven't written many for myself. Mostly, aliases/functions and some scripts in Bash/Python.

Extract details for command options from man/help: https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help/blob/master/c...

cut-like syntax for field manipulations with regexp, negative indexing, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/regexp-cut/blob/main/rcut

simple calculator using python syntax: https://learnbyexample.github.io/practice_python_projects/ca...

rcut - my own bash+awk script, supports regexp delimiters, field reordering, negative indexing, etc

Nice, especially the format output.

See also:

* hck (https://github.com/sstadick/hck) - close to drop in replacement for cut that can use a regex delimiter instead of a fixed string

* rcut (https://github.com/learnbyexample/regexp-cut) - my own bash+awk script, supports regexp delimiters, field reordering, negative indexing, etc

I saw about `hck` recently on twitter, was impressed to see support for compressed files. From the current todo list, I hope complement is implemented for sure.

I see Negative index is currently "unlikely". I'm writing a similar tool [0], but with bash+awk. I solved the negative index support with a `-n` option, which changes the range syntax to `:` instead of `-` character.

My biggest trouble came with literal field separator [1], because FS can only be specified as a string in awk and backslash is a metacharacter for both string and regexp.

[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/regexp-cut

[1] https://learnbyexample.github.io/escaping-madness-awk-litera...