Pipelines

A pipeline is a sequence of one or more commands separated by the character "|. The format for a pipeline is:

The standard output of the command on the LHS of the pipe character is connected to the standard input of the RHS of the pipe character.

e.g.

• Not a pipeline at all:

  ps auwx

• Output of the ps command is fed into the less command:

  ps auwx | less

• Output of the ps command is fed into the grep command. The grep processes the input from ps and its output is further fed into the less command:

  ps auwx | grep 'tty' | less