I like unnecessary cat because it makes the rest of the pipe reusable across other commands

Eg if I want to test out my greps on a static file and then switch to grepping based on a tail -f command

Yep. I use unnecessary cats when I’m using the shell interactively, and especially when I’m building up some complex pipeline of commands by figuring out how to do each step before moving onto the next.

Once I have the final command, if I’m moving it into a shell script, then _maybe_ I’ll switch to file redirection.