Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Combining Commands

So far, we have been using commands only individually, and for the most part that is what you do in practice. However, some of the real power of these commands lies in the capability to join them together to get exactly what you want. There are some extra little commands that we have not looked at that are often used as glue because they do one very simple thing that enables a more complex process to work.

All the commands we have looked at have printed their information to the screen, but this is often flexible. There are two ways to control where output should go: piping and output redirection. A pipe is a connector between one command’s output and another’s input. Instead of sending its output to your terminal, using a ...