You could argue that people who complain about wasting a cat are ignoring the Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well." Moreso with wc -l vs grep -c. If

You could argue that people who complain about wasting a cat are ignoring the Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well." Moreso with wc -l vs grep -c. If I know that wc -l is how to count lines, I don't want to remember the options for counting lines built into every other command.