If looking at the common pipe chains from shell histories tells me anything, it is that people are not very familiar with the tools at their disposal.

Just look at some of these chains:

    ps | grep
    cat | grep
    find | grep
    find | xargs
    grep | wc
    ls | grep
    echo | grep
    grep | grep

The legitimate uses for those pipe chains (while they do exist) are few and far between...

A particularly odd one on the list was `type | head`. Does anyone know the purpose of this?