I'm never doing just one thing to a file! I'm grepping and JQing and then piping it to JQ again because I'm kind of dumb (and it's faster to do what I do know how to do than it is to look up the perfect way to do it), then I'm outputting as a TSV and piping that to `column -ts $'\t'`. ^r reveals a decent example:

    cat expected.1376| sed '1,4d' | rg '(\t\d)\t.*' --replace '$1' | column -ts $'\t'

I was figuring shit out along the way and it'd be pretty annoying to adjust which command gets the filename throughout that process.

You know what? I'll tell you another thing I do that's similar:

    SELECT * FROM whatever WHERE true
        AND last_modified > 123
        AND otherfield NOT NULL

Always bugged me that you say WHERE for the first one and AND thereafter, so if I'm poking around the database trying to create actionable insights for key stakeholders at the speed of business just as I was above with the text file, I like to be able to futz and delete/add clauses as I see fit just as I do pipeline stages.