I'm always surprised to see "Useless Use of Cat Award"[1] recipients in such compilations. I know there is some debate[2] around UUOC, but somehow this sort of

I'm always surprised to see "Useless Use of Cat Award"[1] recipients in such compilations. I know there is some debate[2] around UUOC, but somehow this sort of thing (from the top-voted answer) seems wasteful: cat access.log | egrep -o 'acct_id=[0-9]+' | cut -d= -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn Why not just egrep -o 'acct_id=[0-9]+' access.log | cut -d= -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn ? Perhaps for these sorts of tutorials, the former is clearer on first inspection. But I can't help agreeing with bahamat[3] that it's about "forming good habits and discouraging bad ones". [1] http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#cat http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#cat [2] http://superuser.com/questions/323060/what-is-the-general-consensus-on-useless-use-of-cat http://superuser.com/questions/323060/what-is-the-general-co... [3] http://superuser.com/a/323167/38084 http://superuser.com/a/323167/38084