No, in ordinary usage it doesn't matter, and it's not like I would go out of my way to change someone else's script code. But if teaching or demonstrating shel

No, in ordinary usage it doesn't matter, and it's not like I would go out of my way to change someone else's script code. But if teaching or demonstrating shell features, I'd say that it's important to know that redirection is the most efficient, explicit, and available method. Indeed, a student could learn "cat file | ..." as a standard idiom and never use an initial redirect, but what happens when they come across one "in the wild"? They should know its proper interpretation, because it can otherwise be a bit jarring to see and difficult to interpret.