UNIX philosophy.

Why is the opposite of cat tee, and it's not even a proper opposite but also does a different thing (outputs to stdout) (which is ostensibly its real purpose)?

Also, why do I even need the opposite of cat (and cat itself while we are at it) when those needs should have been served by input and output redirection, but turns out that the latter is completely made up and broken shell bullshit: you can't cat <file1 <file2, and you can't EDITOR='echo zzz >>$1' visudo for example.

Orthogonal design, my ass. Do one thing and do it well, my ass.

>>53

I think you got it wrong then. Farbfeld is a binary format, and our friend LAC here proposes a text format. You are right about the common case though, and binary formats make a lot of sense in so many ways.

>>50

yeah yeah sure, what I meant with the question is: how often do you actually generate images in the command line just using command line tools (say a simple task like "fill a 50x50 pixel with just red pixels"). These tasks are simple to solve with a text format, but this is the 0.1% case and this is not what you should go for.

Talking about cobbled-together: If you find a bug in farbfeld I invite you to a beer. It's a one-time offer of course.
And no subtle bug, I mean a real bug that crashes the program.