Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

3
  • 4
    +1 To make it clearer: output to the console is much much slower than output to a file, even more so because the file could likely still be in disk cache (RAM) when the process is complete. Commented Apr 19, 2014 at 11:13
  • 1
    * expands to all the filenames in the current directory except the hidden ones, unless the shell option dotglob is set. Commented Apr 19, 2014 at 11:48
  • And again because * includes bigfile, cat * >>bigfile would, depending on the cat implementation and the names sizes of the files involved, possibly loop indefinitely copying bigfile into itself or stop with or without an error. Commented Apr 19, 2014 at 23:05