I keep having a hard time getting rid of the connotations of
“pipe” from the unix world. A pipe, in that context, is a software
component (an interprocess communication connector) that hooks the output from
one software program to the input of a second (normally different) software
program. There are named pipes also that can persist between processes, etc. Can
we discuss finding a term for what we now call “message pipes” that
does not have these associations?
pipe
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Last modified: Sunday, September 01, 1996 |
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A temporary software connection
between two programs
or commands.
Normally, the operating
system accepts input
from the keyboard
and sends output to
the display
screen. Sometimes, however, it is useful to use the output from one command
as the input for a second command, without passing the data through the keyboard or
display screen. Pipes were invented for these situations.
One of
the best examples of pipe usage is linking the command that lists files in a directory to a
command that sorts data.
By piping the two commands together, you can display the files in sorted order.
In UNIX and DOS, the pipe symbol is a
vertical bar (|). The DOS
command to list files in alphabetical order, therefore, would be:
DIR | SORT
credit to http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/pipe.html