For years, I thought that |
(pipe) was a notation which connects the left side’s stdout to the right side’s stdin. For example,
% ls -t | head
ls’s stdout is connected to head’s stdin.
While it is semantically “okay” understanding, technically speaking, that creates a pipe in the first place. Then the pipe is connected to ls’s stdin and head’s stdout.
From pipe(7);
Pipes and FIFOs (also known as named pipes) provide a unidirectional interprocess communication channel.
This misunderstanding also made me really confused about named pipes. I simply didn’t get it. Now I know that a Unix pipe is a thing. Giving a filesystem presence for the thing makes sense.
Source: posts/2020/pipe.md