Linux and the Unix Philosophy

The Unix pipe mechanism allows the output from one command to be

fed directly into another command’s input without the use of temporary files.

A quick example is

find / | grep part

This command is really two commands—find and grep. The find com

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mand outputs a list of the names of all files on the system. The grep command

selects only those file names containing the string “part.” The pipe symbol “|”

is the “pipeline” that allows the data to pass from the output of find to the

input of grep.

Both the find and grep commands are invoked simultaneously in a style of

computing known as “multitasking.” As data becomes available on the output

of find, it is ...