Chain Multiple Commands

Most commands take in some input and return some output. In Linux, we can use this feature to chain together multiple commands, each one taking the standard output of the previous command as its standard input. We can do this using the pipeline operator, |.

Create Example Files

touch sales.txt marketing.txt operations.txt hr.txt procurement.txt devops.txt

Create A Pipeline

ls and sort are two commands. In this example we pipe the standard output of ls into the standard input of sort and then see sort’s standard output. This simple example pipeline chain only contains two commands but often chains contain three or four commands.

ls | sort

devops.txt
hr.txt
marketing.txt
operations.txt
procurement.txt
sales.txt