Clearly a pipeline is more convenient.

Filename Expansion

Often you want a command to work with a group of files. Wildcards are used
to create a filename expansion pattern: a series of characters and
wildcards that expands to a list of filenames. For example, the pattern
/etc/* expands to a list of all6.2 the files in /etc.

* is a wildcard that can stand for any series of characters, so the
pattern /etc/* will expand to a list of all the filenames beginning with
/etc/.

This filename list is most useful as a set of arguments for a command. For
example, the /etc directory contains a series of subdirectories called
rc0.d, rc1.d, etc. Normally to view the contents of these, you would type
the following:

ls /etc/rc0.d /etc/rc1.d /etc/rc2.d /etc/rc3.d

ls /etc/rc4.d /etc/rc5.d /etc/rc6.d /etc/rcS.d

This is tedious. Instead, you can use the ? wildcard as shown here:

ls /etc/rc?.d
/etc/rc?.d expands to a list of filenames that begin with rc, followed by
any single character, followed by .d.

Available wildcards include the following: