cat is misunderstood a lot. The purpose of cat is to combine multiple files together (it’s literally short for “concatenate”), like cat *.log to combine all log files together.

If you’re just using it for a single file, then you should just redirect the file to stdin. These two command lines behave similarly:

cat foo.txt | some-command

some-command < foo.txt

For head, tail, grep and some other commands, you can just pass in the file name directly as an argument (e.g. grep whatever foo.txt).