BLOWING YOUR OWN PIPE

Piping is a powerful feature of the Linux shell that promotes the composition of simple, specialised commands to perform complexly chained tasks efficiently. It enables you to build intricate workflows by combining the strengths of individual commands.

It is a mechanism that allows the output of one command to be used as the input for another. It enables you to chain multiple commands together, creating a pipeline for data to flow from one command to the next. The pipe symbol ( | ) is used to denote the connection between commands in a pipeline. Here’s a basic explanation of how piping works:

1 Command execution

When you enter a command in the Linux shell, the command is executed, and it produces output (stdout) that is typically displayed on the terminal.

2 Pipe symbol ( | )

The pipe symbol ( | ) is used to connect the output of one command to the input of another. It tells the shell to take the output from the command on the left and use it as the input for the command on the right.

3 Data flow

The data produced by the first command is sent through the pipe to the second command. This enables you to perform a series of operations on the data without explicitly creating temporary files or storing intermediate results.

4 Chaining commands

You can chain multiple commands together in a pipeline, creating a sequence of operations. For example: bash command1 | command2 | command3

Here, the output of command1 is passed to command2, and the output of command2 is passed to command3.

5 Use cases

Piping is commonly used for tasks such as filtering, sorting, searching and transforming data. For instance, you might use grep to filter lines containing a specific pattern and then use sort to sort those lines.