>Mentally, I think of most Unix utilities as operating on STDIN and producing STDOUT Yeah, that is actually very much the point. You are passing the contents

>Mentally, I think of most Unix utilities as operating on STDIN and producing STDOUT Yeah, that is actually very much the point. You are passing the contents of the file in to grep's STDIN. So why not just do exactly that rather than cat it first for no reason? You don't need to remember how to tell commands to read from a file, you just need to learn the basics of how your shell works. <file grep xyz