Foundations Updated 2026-09 View as Markdown

Pipelines

Pipelines, often called pipes, is a way to chain commands and connect output from one command to the input of the next.

Pipelines, often called pipes, is a way to chain commands and connect output from one command to the input of the next. A pipeline is represented by the pipe character: |. It’s particularly handy when a complex or long input is required for a command.

command1 | command2

By default pipelines redirects only the standard output, if you want to include the standard error you need to use the form |& which is a short hand for 2>&1 |.

Example:#

Imagine you quickly want to know the number of entries in a directory, you can use a pipe to redirect the output of the ls command to the wc command with option -l.

ls / | wc -l

Then you want to see only the first 10 results

ls / | head

Note: head outputs the first 10 lines by default, use option -n to change this behavior

4

#!/bin/bash
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l