Pipeline (Unix)

In Unix-like computer operating systems, a pipeline is a mechanism for inter-process communication using message passing. A pipeline is a set of processes chained together by their standard streams, so that the output text of each process (stdout) is passed directly as input (stdin) to the next one. The second process is started as the first process is still executing, and they are executed concurrently. The concept of pipelines was championed by Douglas McIlroy at Unix's ancestral home of Bell Labs, during the development of Unix, shaping its toolbox philosophy. It is named by analogy to a physical pipeline. A key feature of these pipelines is their "hiding of internals" (Ritchie & Thompson, 1974). This in turn allows for more clarity and simplicity in the system. This article is about anonymous pipes, where data written by one process is buffered by the operating system until it is read by the next process, and this uni-directional channel disappears when the processes are completed. This differs from named pipes, where messages are passed to or from a pipe that is named by making it a file, and remains after the processes are completed. The standard shell syntax for anonymous pipes is to list multiple commands, separated by vertical bars ("pipes" in common Unix verbiage): command1 | command2 | command3 For example, to list files in the current directory (), retain only the lines of output containing the string (), and view the result in a scrolling page (), a user types the following into the command line of a terminal: ls -l | grep key | less The command ls -l is executed as a process, the output (stdout) of which is piped to the input (stdin) of the process for grep key; and likewise for the process for less. Each process takes input from the previous process and produces output for the next process via standard streams. Each | tells the shell to connect the standard output of the command on the left to the standard input of the command on the right by an inter-process communication mechanism called an (anonymous) pipe, implemented in the operating system.