| is not a pipe

By 2 Freddy Gui on April 23, 2007

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Discussion (25)

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8 Rorek who disagreed, says

What's a pipe to you guys, u== ?

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5 Robin Millette who disagreed, says

René Magritte knows his pipes.

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2 steve_c who hasn't voted, says

No, he just knows pictures of pipes

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4 fuzuku who hasn't voted, says

|

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8 Vynce who agreed, says

he knows what is not a pipe.

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10 Rachel who hasn't voted, says

I'd give Magritte "not a pipe" cred if he were on Jyte.

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1 Gonzalo Arreche who disagreed, says

why not a pipe ?
cat error.log | less
send output of cat to less via pipe.. it's a pipe, no dude... :)

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8 Vynce who agreed, says

but the one in his claim isn't piping; therefore it is not a pipe, merely an ascii represenation of what a pipe looks like.

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5 Robin Millette who disagreed, says

@gonzalo that's the worst use of "cat" and "|" by the way.

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No_score Daeltar who disagreed, says

But still no most useless cat ever ;)

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7 Running Wyscans who disagreed, says

"You've got your problems. ... I've got my #|"

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2 Roxanne who hasn't voted, says

WTF are you ppl talkin about?

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2 Karl Anderson who disagreed, says

Vynce: I cut and pasted the | from the claim to my shell and used it as a pipe - doesn't that count? It was just ASCII or Unicode on the wire a few times in between.

That's where we differ from Magritte and his pipe. We're looking through the encoding to the Platonic pipe in the claim, just as when we type it into the shell we're not saying "apply this character to this stream", we're saying "we both agree that when we see this character, the stream should be piped".

Clearly these debates are destined to be as monumental as those which occupied Federation philosophers when the transporter was invented.

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8 Vynce who agreed, says

But in the claim it is not a pipe. in the claim it is not an encoding representation of a pipe. it is a character that, other times, other places, is a pipe.

I can play "sally" on my scrabble board because, when I do, it's not a name, even though it can be a name elsewhere.

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3 PanDeism Fish who disagreed, says

On Wikipedia, that's a pipe....

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3 atomicthumbs who disagreed, says

Gonzalo Arreche: "less error.log"

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7 Cobra Baghdad who agreed, says

The killer was Vynce with the | on the tag police group.

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8 Vynce who agreed, says

how do you use it on wikipedia?

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2 u2elan who disagreed, says

This terminology transcends Linux into mainstream computing. It's a freaking pipe. This is captain Microsoft backing it. Anyone who says otherwise needs to lay off the hashish.

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3 Mark J who agreed, says

It is a symbol which stands for the concept of a UNIX pipe. Even if it's transcended UNIX-like operating systems it's still just the symbol, not the pipe itself.

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No_score nerdbeard.myopenid.com who hasn't voted, says

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar claims that "pipe" is an acceptable name for that character, both prescriptively and descriptively.

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8 Vynce who agreed, says

and anybody who thinks that how many operating systems it works on, or what the name of the character is, or whether it's in ASCII or Unicode is relevant is missing the point.

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7 Cobra Baghdad who agreed, says

And anyone who can have this argument one way or the other is probably missing the point, of being alive. Beautiful day out there, sun, air, I recommend someone enjoy it.

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8 Vynce who agreed, says

turns out that trying to enjoy the sun is very painful.

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3 Marphod who agreed, says

@Roxanne: 6 months removed, but better than never (or, possibly lost to a deleted account)

The reference is to an shell pipe.

A shell is what you type interactive commands into a computer. Windows has a cmd shell (from cmd.exe). Where you can type things like 'dir' to get a directory listing. In unix, there are various shells (most end in the letters 'sh', such as bash, zsh, tcsh, etc.).

The Pipe takes the output from one command and passes it as input to another. for instance, the command 'cat' takes the contents of one or more files and displays it in your shell (so, 'cat README.txt' takes the contents of README.txt and displays them. Cat stands for concatenate, which I can explain, but seems superfulous).

You may want to do something with the output from cat. Say, you only cared about lines with 'marphod' in them. You can use a program like grep to do that -- 'grep marphod' will take input and display only the lines that contain marphod in them. (grep is a lot more powerful than this, but it is a trivial example).

So, 'cat README.txt | grep marphod' would take the contents of README.txt and instead of displaying them, use them as input to grep. Grep would then only display the lines that contain marphod.

(this is a trivial and silly example, as there are better ways to do this, but it does illustrate what a pipe is).

MOST shells use the vertical bar character for this use of a pipe. There are a few that use other characters.

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