I'll be honest, 99% of the time I run cat file | grep string

@farhan grep file -e pattern

@farhan There are uses for both. cat | grep when finding out what is the best pipeline for processing a file (usually, more than just grep comes after). grep directly when performance optimization is needed.

@farhan In interactive use, I often start my pipeline with a cat and iteratively build it up from there.

@farhan usually the latter, but if I was using cat in the last command, there's a high chance I'll do the former

@farhan honestly it's about 50/50. i grep pattern file more often when globbing or running a recursive grep, but for single files i tend to unthinkingly cat to grep

@farhan i love using pipes, but since i discovered the correct way to use grep, i'm using it that way

@farhan nooooo I lost 😥😂

@farhan alsohttp://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html

@farhan my weakness is the use of file | grep term...