For troubleshooting or statistical reasons. It's serving as the backing data store. So piping through grep, or to wc, etc. Specifically not sending the output to the screen.

Sure.

As this is a standard Ubuntu install, ls is indeed aliased to "ls --color" - but afaik ls as standard detects pipes, and turns off color (so you don't get a lot of control characters if you do "ls --color | sort > file.txt". Unless you use --color=always if I recall correctly.

Just wanted to differentiate between "select * from documents" and "select count(*) from documents" being slow.