The legitimate use comes from real world situation. Quite often I first cat a file only to find out it is too large to look through by hand and only then grep it. As the last command was `cat &#x2F;some&#x2F;long&#x2F;path`, I go up to the last command and just add the grep to the end (and thus end up with cat | grep). Likewise, I vaguely remember that grep has a count switch, but looking it up in the manpage is more work than using wc (-&gt; grep | wc). And likewise, before I would use find&#x27;s -exec command I would need to look up the precise syntax again, because there where some details regarding character escapes, IIRC.<p>Remember, we are always intermediates at most things[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;defending-perpetual-intermediacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;defending-perpetual-intermedia...</a>