From the Unix Philosophy.

The concept of communication between programs is pivotal, a challenge every novice programmer will encounter. On a Unix system, a simple yet effective method for data sharing is through pipes.

Contrary to the initial perception of complexity by beginners, pipes represent perhaps the most straightforward approach for inter-process communication on Unix-based operating systems.

A pipe channels input stdin (typically from the keyboard) to outputs stdout and stderr (usually to the display).

Essentially, a Unix pipe facilitates a one-directional stream of data.

For further information, see Pipeline (Unix) - Wikipedia.

Origin: Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann)
References:
Created 2024-01-07