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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Linux Beginner Part-7 (Piping and Redirection)

Piping:

The pipe character, “|”, is used to chain two or more commands together. The output of the first command is “piped” into the next program, and if there is a second pipe, the output is sent to the third program, etc.  For example:

ls -la /usr/bin | less

In this example, we run the command “ls -la /usr/bin”, which gives us a long listing of all of the files in /usr/bin. Because the output of this command is typically very long, we pipe the output to a program called “less”, which displays the output for us one screen at a time.


Redirection:

Redirection used for different purpose. Sometimes we want to input something in file without editing it with an editor. Example:

echo "this is a test" > test

It will enter the text "this is a test" in the file named test.

Sometimes we need to save the output of a command to a file without showing it in the display. Example:
grep "status=sent" /var/log/mail.log > /tmp/log
It will save the output of the command in the file, named log.

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