Pipelines

Philosophy of the commandline: Small tools that do one thing very well, loosely connected together to make custom "pipelines" or workflows to do specific (or surprising) things.

stdin and stdout

Every program receives "standard in", and sends its output to "standard out". By default, stdin is taken from the keyboard, and stdout will display something to the screen. These mappings can be adjusted however using redirection using the special pipeline characters '>', '<', and '|'.

Redirecting stdout with >

date

Displays the date to the screen (no stdin used by date).

date > time.txt

Redirects the output of date and "saves as" time.txt.

cat time.txt

Display time.txt (to the screen by default)