Using Pipes with Linux Commands

The following post is a section of the book 'Just Enough Linux'.  The entire book can be downloaded in pdf format for free from Leanpub or you can read it online here.
Since this post is a snapshot in time. I recommend that you download a copy of the book which is updated frequently to improve and expand the content.

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Pipes are used in Linux to combine commands to allow them to have the output from a command feed directly into another command and so on. The idea is to use multiple commands to create a sequence of processing information from one command to another.

The commands are separated by the vertical line (|) that is normally found above the backslash key (\). This is the character that denotes the ‘pipe’ function. To combine three functions together with pipe symbol we would have something like the following;

command1 | command2 | command3

As the name suggests, we can think of the pipe function as representing commands linked by a pipe where the command runs a function that is output in a pipe to flow to the second command and on to the eventual final output. To help with the visual association it might be useful to think of the connections similar to the following;

Piping one command after another

To demonstrate by example we can consider a set of commands lined as follows;

Piping Example

Here we have the ls command that is listing the contents of the /var/log directory with the listings sorted by time. This is then feeding into the head command that will only display the first 10 of those lines. We then feed those 10 lines into a grep command that filters the result to show only those lines that have the word ‘root’ in them.

The command as it would be run from the command line would be as follows;

ls -lt /var/log | head | grep root

… and the output would appear something like the following;

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ ls -lt /var/log | head | grep root
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm  133637 Sep 13 04:01 auth.log
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm   16794 Sep 13 04:01 syslog
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root  utmp 292292 Sep 12 18:58 lastlog
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root  utmp   2688 Sep 12 18:58 wtmp
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm    1050 Sep 12 06:25 messages
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm   18986 Sep 12 06:25 syslog.1
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm    1357 Sep 11 06:25 syslog.2.gz

The post above (and heaps of other stuff) is in the book 'Just Enough Linux' that can be downloaded for free (or donate if you really want to :-)).