@joel Yeah, I've never seen the moreutils installed by default. I don't use most of them, but I like in particular sponge, ts, and vipe.
sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file [that's its description, but I'd like if it were called "buf" or something, because what it does is buffer stdin until EOF, then write it to stdout. I love it]
ts: timestamp standard input
vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe