Sometimes I like to start with cat so I can easily swap for zcat when changing to gripped input.
There are enough variations in ways to do things on Unix that I've sometimes wondered about how easy it would be to identify a user by seeing how they accomplish a common task.
For instance, I noticed at one place I worked that even though everyone used the same set of options when doing a "cpio -p", everyone had their own order they wrote them. Seeing one "cpio -p" command was sufficient to tell which of the half dozen of us had done the command.
I think I'm the only one where I work who uses "sed Nq" instead of "head -N", so that would fingerprint me.
So one day I telnetted into a Solaris machine and immediately typed "lsl" before doing anything else. A short while later a colleague came to my cube. He had been snooping the hme1 interface and saw me login. He didn't need to trace the IP because he knew it was me when he saw 3 telnet packets with "l" "s" "l" in them.