Pipes are wonderful! In my opinion you can’t extol them by themselves. One has to bask in a fuller set of features that are so much greater than the sum of their parts, to feel the warmth of Unix:
(1) everything is text
(2) everything (ish) is a file
(3) including pipes and fds
(4) every piece of software is accessible as a file, invoked at the command line
(5) ...with local arguments
(6) ...and persistent globals in the environment
A lot of understanding comes once you know what execve does, though such knowledge is of course not necessary. It just helps.
Unix is seriously uncool with young people at the moment. I intend to turn that around and articles like this offer good material.
(1) everything is text
(2) everything (ish) is a file
(3) including pipes and fds
(4) every piece of software is accessible as a file, invoked at the command line
(5) ...with local arguments
(6) ...and persistent globals in the environment
A lot of understanding comes once you know what execve does, though such knowledge is of course not necessary. It just helps.
Unix is seriously uncool with young people at the moment. I intend to turn that around and articles like this offer good material.