You can't do random access through a pipe, so you can't binary search for it, or if you have some kind of probabilistic skip-sampling tool that won't work. Pipes don't have names, so anything that expects to work with them won't work. You can't re-read the same file. I don't know all the things you might want to do, but that's kind of my point - most things work with and expect files, and so if you want to be able to count on being able to use other unknown tools, a file is what you need.