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Comment by sm4rk0 | Hacker News Reader

Is there any benefit of

  cat files* | grep pattern

over this

  grep -h pattern files*

aside from result color highlighting?

Even though it's a faux pas, I find it logically makes more sense to me.

Consider a pipeline like

    cat *.log | grep "apache" | grep -v "1.1.1.1" | wc -l

It makes sense in that order. Read the file, grep this, exclude that, could the total. Meanwhile

    grep "apache" *.log | grep -v "1.1.1.1" | wc -l

may be a few characters shorter but the order isn't really logical anymore.

With the first method, you can use xargs to run multiple copies of grep running in parallel like he did later in the article.

The author switched to using find before doing the parallelization.

I've read this, but still can't see a reason to use 'cat | grep':

I don't think there is.