Pipes: |

You may find yourself in situations in which you need to send data from one command to another. In other words, you may want to send the standard output of a command to another command, not to a destination file. Suppose you want to send a list of your filenames to the printer to be printed. You need two commands to do this: the ls command to generate a list of filenames and the lpr command to send the list to the printer. In effect, you need to take the output of the ls command and use it as input for the lpr command. You can think of the data as flowing from one command to another. To form such a connection in Linux, you use what is called a pipe. The pipe operator, |, (vertical bar character) placed between two commands forms a connection between them. The standard output of one command becomes the standard input for the other. The pipe operation receives output from the command placed before the pipe and sends this data as input to the command placed after the pipe. As shown in the next example, you can connect the ls command and the lpr command with a pipe. The list of filenames output by the ls command is piped into the lpr command.

$ ls | lpr

You can combine the pipe operation with other shell features, such as file expansion characters, to perform specialized operations. The next example prints only files with a .c extension. The ls command is used with the asterisk and ".c" to generate a list of filenames with the .c extension. Then this list is piped to the lpr command.

$ ls *.c | lpr

In the preceding example, a list of filenames was used as input, but what is important to note is pipes operate on the standard output of a command, whatever that might be. The contents of whole files or even several files can be piped from one command to another. In the next example, the cat command reads and outputs the contents of the mydata file, which are then piped to the lpr command:

$ cat mydata | lpr

Linux has many commands that generate modified output. For example, the sort command takes the contents of a file and generates a version with each line sorted in alphabetic order. The sort command works best with files that are lists of items. Commands such as sort that output a modified version of its input are referred to as filters. Filters are often used with pipes. In the next example, a sorted version of mylist is generated and piped into the more command for display on the screen. Note that the original file, mylist, has not been changed and is not itself sorted. Only the output of sort in the standard output is sorted.

$ sort mylist | more

The standard input piped into a command can be more carefully controlled with the standard input argument, -. When you use the dash as an argument for a command, it represents the standard input.