Why? The extra 3 letters of "cat" are usually going to take less time to type the mental overhead of "where do I put the input file for this command" or the add

Why? The extra 3 letters of "cat" are usually going to take less time to type the mental overhead of "where do I put the input file for this command" or the additional pipeline reasoning. I actually sometimes do it one way and sometimes the other, whatever comes to my fingers first (which is going to vary according to how I'm visualizing the pipeline of tasks in my head). In general I far prefer the (it seems to me) more Unixy way of having lots of very simple commands and chaining them together over the use of extra options and arguments.