[ilyt]

> What's natural about cat on only one file?

It's about building the query, really. Here is example:

    cat file.log

"Oh, it's too big, I only care about these messages"

    cat file.log |grep error_name

"don't care about old stuff, show me the new one"

    cat file.log |grep error_name | tail

"hmm, show me when it started, and let's ignore monitoring checks"

    cat file.log |grep error_name | grep -v 'user: mon'| head

"okay, but maybe log was rotated ? Let's see last week"

    zcat file.log.1 |grep error_name | grep -v 'user: mon'| head

"hmm, it's some old error, let's search some more logs"

    zcat file.log.{10..1} |grep error_name | grep -v 'user: mon'| head

(zcat will auto add .gz if not passed)

You can't for example do

    < file.log.{1..10} zcat

[benatkin]

That's a lot of extra processes!

There's also zgrep: https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/grep.1

[scubbo]

And if you're in a situation where you care about the overhead of extra processes, you wouldn't be exploratively and iteratively constructing a query on the command-line - you'd have already done the exploration in order to understand exactly what query you needed, and then would be converting the query into a non-bash programming language for optimization.