|
Pipes
is probably one of the most important features that is available
in the Unix shell. This feature is simply astonishing, specially
to people who are not familiar to the concept of pipes are totally
surprised when they see it work. Without further delay, lets get
to the core issue.
Explanation :
Pipes as the name suggests is a sort of hollow tube (a pipe) where
you can put data into one end and get it out of the other end.
Whats the use? You will see soon.. Using pipes you can connect
two programs. Using pipes you can make the output of a particular
command to act as the input for another command.
This is best explained using an example
$ ls | grep 'mp3'
This command basically consists of 2 commands joined by a pipe.
The first command gets the listing of the current directory and
then pipes it to (sends it to) the second command which is a grep
command. The grep command selects those lines from the directory
listing (which it received from the ls command) having the string
'mp3' in them. So basically as a result of this command you would
get a list of files / directories that have the letters 'mp3'
in their names.
You might think this is not really useful, when you could have
used some form of ls command itself (probably shorter) to get
the some work done. The use of pipes becomes evident as you design
more complex commands.
Take the following command. This one too is simple, but you would
get the idea behind pipes.
$ ls | grep 'mp3' | sort -r
This command would do the same as the above one, but this time
instead of displaying all the files/directories having the string
'mp3' in their names, this result is passed on to the sort command
through a pipe. The sort command with the -r option sorts this
result in the reverse order. And then finally displays the result.
Thus as you can see, pipes let you pass the output of one command
to the input of another command. You can carry on this chain as
long as you want (you can use pipes between 5,6,7..commands..how
many ever you want) ..and you can get extremely customized outputs.
The capabilities of Unix shell when pipes are used effectively
is left to your imagination.
In A Nutshell :
Basically pipes can be used with most of the Unix commands. But
the basic concept remains the same - the output of the first command
acts as the input to the second command. You should take care
to check that the output of the first command is acceptable
input to the second command. It
should not be that the first command has its output in some format
other than text format and the second command works with only
text input. If at all this sort of thing happens, you would
mostly get an error message or you would have to type <Ctrl>-C
to quit the execution of the command and come back to the prompt.
|
