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This Cut, sort, uniq and piping a histogram discussion in the Intermediate Unix course provides a some good exampleexamples.
For scripting
Because bash is an execution environment, it is uniquely well suited for executing a series of processing steps, often calling other programs or utilities, and integrating the results. Such scripts are sometimes termed pipeline scripts and can automate processes that consist of many sub tasks – for example, next-gen sequencing alignment pipeline scripts that go from raw reads (FASTQ files) to alignment reports (sorted, index BAM files), gathering statistics along the way.
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