combine multiple commands like tr, iconv and dd

New to shell scripting, I have few commands like this. Is it optimal to have such temporary files or should I try to combine all these commands ? if it is latter, can you help me to redirect output from dd command to tr command and then to iconv. Thanks. dd if=abcd.dat cbs=38 conv=block of=abcd.temp cat abcd.temp | tr -d "\n" | tr -d "\r" > abcd.output iconv -f ASCII -t EBCDIC-US abcd.ebcdic