So does the pipeline above. It's not detrimental to performance since an empty cat is a no-op in a pipeline. You can have any number of them. But commands shou

So does the pipeline above. It's not detrimental to performance since an empty cat is a no-op in a pipeline. You can have any number of them. But commands should be written for humans to understand, and inserting no-ops is a distraction to the reader. In the trivial example, "grep needle haystack" reads better than "cat haystack | grep needle".