I prefer the first way, as you can read it left to right and each step is meaningful. "Take the contents of file, process it through somecmd, then save the resu

I prefer the first way, as you can read it left to right and each step is meaningful. "Take the contents of file, process it through somecmd, then save the result to file2." I would hope both commands boil down to exactly the same action. Any overhead from invoking cat (isn't that a shell built-in?) should be negligible.