[teddyh]

  cat foo | bar

is useless use of cat, since it’s equivalent to

  < foo bar

which is both shorter and starts one less process. Why do you think that “cat” makes it “easier to author pipelines”?

[dblotsky]

1). It doesn’t work in all shells, so you have to think about your environment before you use it.

2). I often start with `bar < foo`, so if I need to add more arguments to `bar`, I need to always skip over the input.

3). If I just want to delete all processing and look at the input, I can’t just backspace away the processing because `< foo` is invalid.