UUOC

Stands for Useless Use of cat ; the reference is to the Unix command cat (1)
, not the feline animal. As received wisdom on comp.unix.shell observes, The
purpose of cat is to concatenate (or catenate ) files. If it's only one
file, concatenating it with nothing at all is a waste of time, and costs you
a process. Nevertheless one sees people doing
catfile|some_commandanditsargs... instead of the equivalent and cheaper
filesome_commandanditsargs... or (equivalently and more classically)
some_commandanditsargs... file Since 1995, occasional awards for UUOC have
been given out, usually by Perl luminary Randal L. Schwartz. There is a web
page devoted to this and other similar awards.