Yes I suppose it's up to you what you do. I look after some systems with hundreds of users logged in at any one time....

If some user decided to do (something like):

Code:

for i in `seq 1 1000`; do
  cat somefile | grep "something"
done

Now we see that the problem isn't just one unecessary process, it's 1000.

This is why I think that best-practice scripting in terms of efficiency should be the pillar of your style, even with the simplest one-liners.

My two cents.

Cheers
ZB