Go Systems Programming

Unix pipes in Go

We first talked about pipes in Chapter 6, File Input and Output. Pipes have two serious limitations: first, they usually communicate in one direction, and second, they can only be used between processes that have a common ancestor.

The general idea behind pipes is that if you do not have a file to process, you should wait to get your input from standard input. Similarly, if you are not told to save your output to a file, you should write your output to standard output, either for the user to see it or for another program to process it. As a result, pipes can be used for streaming data between two processes without creating any temporary files.

This section will present some simple utilities written in Go that use Unix pipes ...