This article is full of Useless Uses of Cat[1] that could just use redirection operators. For instance,

    cat image.iso | pv >/dev/sdb

could be rewritten as

    pv < image.iso > /dev/sdb

A related mistake is the Useless Use of Echo, since any command of the form

    echo "foo" | bar

can be written using here strings as

    bar <<< "foo"

or even

    bar <<WORD
    foo
    WORD

[1] http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html