The pipe operator in Linux

Linux is an open-source operating system that was developed using the C programming language. It consists of a powerful kernel that is used to perform various operations. One of these operations is piping which can be done with the help of the pipe operator.

The pipe operator

Pipe operators are used in Linux systems to combine different commands together. They are used to send the output of one command as the input to the next command.

Syntax

Below, we can see the syntax for the pipe operator (|).

As the pipe operation is uni-directional, the command on the left side feeds the input to the command on the right side of the pipe. So command1's output goes to command2 as input, command2's output goes to command3 as input, and so on.

Example

Suppose we have a text file named myfile.txt, and we want to retrieve the data in the text file in a sorted format. How would we do that?

The solution to this problem requires two commands, one to read the file, which can be done by using the cat command, and the other to sort the file contents, which can be done using the sort command.

The output of the cat command will have to be redirected to the sort command as input. To do this, we would use the pipe operator. So our shell command would be:

Live demonstration

Below we can see a live terminal that executes the command for the example shown above.

When we run the live terminal, we first see that the cat myFile.txt command is executed to display the contents of the text file.

In the second command, the output of the cat command is then piped to the sort command, which displays the file contents in an alphabetical sort fashion.

Conclusion

The pipe operator is a powerful tool in Unix-based operating systems that allows multiple commands to be concatenated together to build complex commands for various tasks, such as data processing, as seen above.