pipe Definition pipe
A pipe directs the output stream of one program into the input
stream of another program, thus coupling the programs together.
With pipes, two or more programs (or filters) can be coupled
together to perform complex transforms on streams of data. For
example, in the following command
cat DATAFILE1 DATAFILE2 | sort | uniq -d
the filter cat opens two files and prints their contents. Its
output is piped to the filter sort, which sorts it. The output
of sort is piped, in turn, to the filter uniq, which (with the -d
option) prints a single copy of each line that is duplicated
within the file. Thus, with this simple set of commands and
pipes, a user can quickly print a list of all lines that appear
in both files.
***** See Also *****
definitions, filter
COHERENT Lexicon Page 1