Pipe

Definitions

1. A mechanism for inter-process communication that connects the standard output of one process to the standard input of another, represented by the | character in Unix shells. The foundational Unix philosophy of small, composable tools depends on pipes.

   In plain English: A way to chain commands together so the output of one feeds directly into the next, like a conveyor belt passing data from station to station.

   Example: "cat access.log | grep 404 | wc -l — three tiny tools piped together to count missing pages."

Related Terms

• Bash
• Cut
• Field Separator
• Pattern Action
• Redirection
• Subshell
• Variable Expansion
• Shebang
• Marshalling
• Named Pipe
• Shell Builtin
• Shell Expansion
• Unix Domain Socket
• Unix Socket