You also gain a "Useless use of cat" award for both of your examples: http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html Both can

You also gain a "Useless use of cat" award for both of your examples: http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html Both can be rewritten as "sort FILE | uniq" and "time wc -l FILE". And given the data size, both non-cat uses would likely be faster as well.