I've done this for single-use pipelines when built up because the nature of the data is unfamiliar. It usually starts with cat file | less and then cat

I've done this for single-use pipelines when built up because the nature of the data is unfamiliar. It usually starts with cat file | less and then cat file | grep bar | less and then cat file | grep bar | awk '{ print $1 }' | less and so on. But if it's going to be used more than once then it does seem odd to have the unnecessary commands. Maybe "advanced" awk (beyond print $1) is unknown to people?