True, but personally, I think this a cost well worth paying for intelligibility and self-documentation. In my opinion, documentation and clarity is more importa

True, but personally, I think this a cost well worth paying for intelligibility and self-documentation. In my opinion, documentation and clarity is more important than maintaining programmer's flow and being economical with command length (and therefore typing time), especially with newer tools that manage a command-line history better. Clear command names pay dividends that outweigh the cost of repeated typing. The dividends come when another person inevitably picks up the shell script you wrote or the documentation you've written to ramp up - and they might not have yet achieved the same level of fluency with the command line. For them these commands might not come pre-integrated. I would never accept a function in a code review named 'xargs' no matter how much of a short-hand convention it became. I think many company styleguides enforce similar rules for code. Why should command line tools be any different?