If you think of the shell as a REPL and an iterative environment, the first variant has many benefits. The first two parts, might be an attempt to see 'can I

If you think of the shell as a REPL and an iterative environment, the first variant has many benefits. The first two parts, might be an attempt to see 'can I write a regex to remove the parts we need to get rid of?. I had better run it first, to see it catches the ones I intended. Oops two times in a row, that one didn't catch them all, and that one would include some of those we MUST keep'. I often do the same with SELECT/DELETE on production databases, so I can visually inspect what I'm about to destroy. Transactions don't help me, because if I haven't verified that I'm correct, I won't know that I should use ROLLBACK.