The Origin of Unix Pipes

by mrleinad • 15 years ago

133 25 15 years ago

scrrr• 15 years ago

According to Wikipedia the UNIX-Pipes came along in the 70s. This document however seems to refer to something called DTSS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_(Unix)#History

mrleinad3• 15 years ago

> Assert(Ken Lochner(DTSS) != Doug McIlroy(|))

True

klochner2• 15 years ago

Wow - I actually added that entry about DTSS a few years after my father (Ken Lochner) died. It's kind of a trip to now read it on HN.

arethuza2• 15 years ago

In my very first job interview I was asked to explain Unix pipes and I used the analogy of garden hoses - only to be told that was a stupid way of explaining them!

nickolai• 15 years ago

I guess you're happy they did not hire you, right?

arethuza2• 15 years ago

I did get the job :-)

billybob• 15 years ago

I'd say they're more like a series of tubes.

mrleinad3• 15 years ago

To "massage data" sounds a bit like what some scientists do whenever they don't get the results they expect.

Kinda funny concept anyway...

njharman• 15 years ago

You've attributed one connotation (probably the one most known to public due to media reporting of scientist malfeasance) to the phrase "massage data". Which actually has the more general meaning of to manipulate, to process data. Perhaps to get the data into different format, or to extract just the rows/columns/bits that are of interest.

mrleinad3• 15 years ago

A drawback of English not being my native language, most probably. :) Thanks for your clarification.

bnegreve• 15 years ago

One should forward this document to microsoft.

sandGorgon3• 15 years ago

I asked this previously on SO - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3121385/is-it-possible-to...

What is the difference between OSX services and Unix pipes ? Could something like OSX services be built trivially on Linux ?

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

As the commenter on your SO post has mentioned, they are not actually the same thing. Pipes are a much lower level concept than these OSX services. Of course you could implement them on linux, and you might even want to use pipes to do it, but its not a terribly interesting problem. Really its just GUI design, not a unix thing at all.

sandGorgon3• 15 years ago

Maybe my question was framed wrong.

If I ask about how a OSX-like services framework may be created, what is the answer ? For example, there are OSX services that remove spaces from text or even summarize paragraphs. IMHO, some of them are contextual - some services only show up as active when you copy a URL, etc.

They seem pretty nifty and I always wondered why Linux doesnt have something like this.

api• 15 years ago

1964.

It is truly amazing just how much of what we use, from big ideas to little ones, was invented in the 1960s.

woodall• 15 years ago

Invention brings the idea to life. Innovation brings the ideas to market.

LogicHoleFlaw2• 15 years ago

Maybe some folks here with a better understanding of pipes than myself can help me figure out how to do the following using pipes and not a temporary file. I need a minimalist method to format a couple of email headers, append an email body, then send that email with `msmtp`. This is all running on a small embedded linux system with some additional packages bolted on. This will be mailing the status updates from my backup server to myself. Partly I'm doing this because I don't want to run a full-blown mail user agent, and partly I'm just curious how concise it can be :)

The requirement is that this be an executable script which can take any number of command-line arguments describing email headers, and which receives the body of an email on STDIN. I think this can all be done via pipes but I'm not entirely sure how - the trick is that the output of the program over STDOUT needs to be the concatenation of formatted command-line arguments plus the contents of STDIN. I had difficulty figuring out how to have two different commands both send output, in order, to the STDIN of `msmtp -t`. msmtp is configured to send email via a Google Apps account.

Here's what I'm using at the moment. It works but I think it could be more elegant and UNIXY without the temporary file.

  #!/bin/sh
  T=`/opt/bin/mktemp`                         # create a temporary file
  echo -e "From:$1\nTo:$2\nSubject:$3\n" > $T # format command-line args into the file
  cat <&0 >>$T                                # append STDIN to the file
  msmtp -t <$T                                # mail the file (-t parses the smtp recipient from the email headers)
  rm $T                                       # delete the file

  # used as follows:
  #/usr/local/bin/minimail "sender@example.com" "recipient@example.com" "Subject of the Email" <body.txt

Any ideas?

klochner2• 15 years ago

http://stackoverflow.com

tripa• 15 years ago

    (echo;cat)|msmtp

But yeah, stackoverflow.com

LogicHoleFlaw2• 15 years ago

That works perfectly. Thank you.

Sorry for the noise.

tastybites• 15 years ago

Glad they chose 'pipe' over 'hose'.

The Origin of Unix Pipes

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