3 ms·
> Today, I piped the output of some process I was running into grep. Neither of these programs knew about the existence of the other. Only because "an unstruct
by bluetomcat 7y ago
> Today, I piped the output of some process I was running into grep. Neither of these programs knew about the existence of the other.
Only because "an unstructured stream of bytes" is the way for Unix processes to communicate. It allows for composability, but a very fragile and unsafe one, requiring programs to spit out and read free text, with all the crazy filtering and guesswork needed.
- garmaine 7y agoYou could pipe structures data. See: PowerShell.
- jnurmine 7y agoFree text? You can just as well pipe structured binary data (such as audio or images) through one or more processing elements. The processors need to understand the data, of course. There are also other IPC mechanisms, like D-Bus.