The legitimate use comes from real world situation. Quite often I first cat a file only to find out it is too large to look through by hand and only then grep i

The legitimate use comes from real world situation. Quite often I first cat a file only to find out it is too large to look through by hand and only then grep it. As the last command was `cat /some/long/path`, I go up to the last command and just add the grep to the end (and thus end up with cat | grep). Likewise, I vaguely remember that grep has a count switch, but looking it up in the manpage is more work than using wc (-> grep | wc). And likewise, before I would use find's -exec command I would need to look up the precise syntax again, because there where some details regarding character escapes, IIRC. Remember, we are always intermediates at most things[1]. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/defending-perpetual-intermediacy/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/defending-perpetual-intermedia...