Good list, but I disagree about the 'piping cats' point. It always seemed like premature optimization to me. Also, the cat at the beginning of the pipe can help

Good list, but I disagree about the 'piping cats' point. It always seemed like premature optimization to me. Also, the cat at the beginning of the pipe can help readability. Something like cat file.txt | grep some_regex | sed ... Versus grep some_regex < file.txt | sed ... I like the first version more, it kind of reads like "take file.txt, then grep, etc". You read it and immediately know you will be working with file.txt. The second one, it's not as obvious. Just a nitpick, sorry for the long post.