The reason these sequences of commands always start with cat, for me at least, is that I just cat’d the file only to find it was too long or noisy. cat filename.txt Up | grep “thing I want” Is fewer keystrokes than cat filename.txt grep “thing I want” filename.txt Or more likely cat filename.txt grep filename.txt “thing I want” grep “thing I want” filename.txt You can also do: grep “thing I want”