alt Hacker News> that may or may not be redirected to a file
This is usually knowable.
It's a different question whether cat should be doing that, though – it's an extremely low level tool. What's wrong with `less`? (Other than the fact that some Docker images seem to not include it, which is pretty annoying and raises the question as to whether `docker exec` should be filtering escape sequences...)
Replies
im3w1l • yesterday at 11:30 PM
Sometimes you don't want to open stuff in a pager.
Besides less having a lot of code (features, bloat) and therefore attack surface (some less honor LESSSECURE=1 which on some OS these days involves some pretty tight pledge(2) restrictions), or that some vendors have configured less by default to automatically run random code so you can automatically page a gziped file or an attacker can maybe run arbitrary code (whoops!). Besides those issues, and any others I do not know about? Nothing.