input-pipe

Shell (~bash) - OS X, Windows, Linux

Disclaimer: These pipes are to be used for tobacco only.

Most of the programs I use at the command line consume and/or produce text. If you want to feed a program text that accepts input on stdin, I’ll either pipe it in from the previous program, or pipe it in directly from file.

For example, if I’m gzipping up an xml file:

gzip -c < thexmlfile.xml

This dumps the contents of thexmlfile.xml directly into the gzip program. Alternatively, sometimes I need to feed gzip the output of some other program:

cat thexmlfile.xml | gzip -c

This is functionally equivalent, but the cat part could really be any program that generates output, possibly an xml cleaning tool like xmllint. The | passes any output from the previous command as input to the next command.