# Then-chaining
In accord with the [Unix philosophy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy), you can pipe data into or out of Miller. For example:
mlr cut --complement -f os_version *.dat | mlr sort -f hostname,uptime
You can, if you like, instead simply chain commands together using the `then` keyword:
mlr cut --complement -f os_version then sort -f hostname,uptime *.dat
(You can precede the very first verb with `then`, if you like, for symmetry.)
Here's a performance comparison:
% cat piped.sh
mlr cut -x -f i,y data/big | mlr sort -n y > /dev/null
% time sh piped.sh
real 0m2.321s
user 0m4.878s
sys 0m1.564s
% cat chained.sh
mlr cut -x -f i,y then sort -n y data/big > /dev/null
% time sh chained.sh
real 0m2.070s
user 0m2.738s
sys 0m1.259s
There are two reasons to use then-chaining: one is for performance, although I don't expect this to be a win in all cases. Using then-chaining avoids redundant string-parsing and string-formatting at each pipeline step: instead input records are parsed once, they are fed through each pipeline stage in memory, and then output records are formatted once.
The other reason to use then-chaining is for simplicity: you don't have re-type formatting flags (e.g. `--csv --fs tab`) at every pipeline stage.