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What is Pipe?

A mechanism that connects the output of one command directly to the input of another, enabling command chaining.

Pipes (|) are fundamental to the Unix philosophy of small, composable tools. For example, cat log.txt | grep ERROR | wc -l counts error lines in a log file by chaining three simple commands.

Named pipes (FIFOs) are special files that allow communication between processes. Pipes enable powerful data processing workflows without creating intermediate files.

Related Terms

Xargs
A command that builds and executes commands from standard input, useful for processing lists of items.
Environment Path
The PATH variable that tells the shell which directories to search when looking for executable commands.
Crontab Syntax
The time specification format used in cron job scheduling, with five fields defining minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week.
Journald
The systemd journal daemon that collects and stores log data from services, the kernel, and boot messages in a structured binary format.
Netstat
A command-line tool that displays network connections, routing tables, and interface statistics on a system.
Strace
A diagnostic tool that traces system calls and signals made by a process, useful for debugging and performance analysis.
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