As a simple example: cat somefiles.txt | pipeline_script > stored_output.txt

Other times I'm reading gzipped files or remote log files, I don't want that data mixed in with the pipeline logic. If I want to move the output files to a different directory on one set of servers, that may not impact my generalized pipeline.

I work with trillions of lines of log files and there are many ways to scale up pipelines. I wouldn't start optimizing the difference between 1.6s and 1.275s unless it made an economic impact on the problem. How often is it run? Can you process more lines in an economic unit of time with the faster version? If this is a job that runs once an hour or even once a minute how many lines are collected during that time?

Intermixing the grep or wc -l logic into the pipeline logic can have adverse support and maintenance costs and many times saves machine time while spending programmer time. Which one dominates in this scenario?

It's like the old saying...there is more than one way to skin a "cat". :)

You're assuming a constant factor here. That might be the case. Or it could be one-time start-up overhead as the linker finds and opens library files.

Unless you profile the process over a range of input sizes, you don't know which you're observing. And you know what they say about premature optimization.

No. And if you actually go to the link to the original question, you'll see that cat doesn't exist.

Last, I would disagree that `cat file` is equivalent to `select * from table`, his argument makes the comparison that `cat file` is equivalent to `table` itself, or `load data into table` which needs to happen before any relation can be performed against it.