For the Love of Pipes

Pipes can be traced back to this note from Doug McIlroy in 1964:

The Unix philosophy is documented by Doug McIlroy as:

What I love about Unix is the philosophy of “do one thing well” and “expect the output of every program to become the input to another”. System programs and commands like , which we saw above, output information to your terminal by default. While reading Program design in Unix, I realized that printing the output of the tool to the user’s terminal was actually the special case. When a user redirects the output of via a to some other program, becomes so much more than what the original author intended. A simple program in combination with a becomes so much more than what the original author could have dreamed of.

Source: blog.jessfraz.com