> It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the front what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass it through a pipeline. There is no need to read

> It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the front what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass it through a pipeline. There is no need to read ahead to find out what the source material is. I only found this out recently, but this works perfectly fine: $ < /some/file awk ... You're not wrong though, where cat improves readability there's no harm in using it.