pipe -- Definition

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

filter,
mkfifo(),
named pipe,
pipe(),
Using COHERENT

© 2012 by Stephen A. Ness