5 ms·

The Origin of Unix Pipes

133 points by mrleinad 16y ago

mrleinad 16y 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 16y 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.
  - mrleinad 16y ago
    A drawback of English not being my native language, most probably. :) Thanks for your clarification.
scrrr 16y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_(Unix)#History
- mrleinad 16y ago
  > Assert(Ken Lochner(DTSS) != Doug McIlroy(|)) True
- klochner 16y 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.
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arethuza 16y 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 16y ago
  I guess you're happy they did not hire you, right?
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I did get the job :-)
- billybob 16y ago
  I'd say they're more like a series of tubes.
bnegreve 16y ago
One should forward this document to microsoft.
sandGorgon 16y ago
I asked this previously on SO - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3121385/is-it-possible-to-make-something-like-osx-services-for-linux-by-leveraging-pipes 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 ?
- burgerbrain 16y 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.
  - sandGorgon 16y 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.
    - georgieporgie 16y ago
      You keep asking the same question repeatedly, hoping that some magic combination of words will lead to a different answer. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/20/9341164.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/20/93411... UNIX pipes are only a tiny bit like OS X Services from a user's perspective. They are nothing alike from a program's perspective. As others have said, UNIX pipes simply connect one program's standard output to another program's standard input. That's all. It uses the exact same mechanism that would otherwise show information to you and accept input from you. OS X Services are a completely different, proprietary thing. It works via the 'Pasteboard' which is rather like a secondary clipboard. Apple created a specific interface which must be recognized by a program in order to supply OS X Services with data. This interface is wholly unrelated to the rest of the program's interfaces. OS X Services are much more akin to something that you would build on Windows using COM, like a Windows Explorer Shell Extension. If you wanted to recreate OS X Services on Linux, you would have to define some sort of new interface for exchanging data between applications, then convince developers around the world to add the new API into their programs.
api 16y 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 16y ago
  Invention brings the idea to life. Innovation brings the ideas to market.
LogicHoleFlaw 16y 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?
- klochner 16y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com http://stackoverflow.com
- tripa 16y ago
  (echo;cat)|msmtp But yeah, stackoverflow.com
  - LogicHoleFlaw 16y ago
    That works perfectly. Thank you. Sorry for the noise.
tastybites 16y ago
Glad they chose 'pipe' over 'hose'.

133 points by mrleinad 16y 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 16y 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.
- mrleinad 16y ago
  A drawback of English not being my native language, most probably. :) Thanks for your clarification.

scrrr 16y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_(Unix)#History

mrleinad 16y ago
> Assert(Ken Lochner(DTSS) != Doug McIlroy(|)) True
klochner 16y 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.

dghtjykuy 16y ago

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arethuza 16y 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 16y ago
I guess you're happy they did not hire you, right?
- arethuza 16y ago
  I did get the job :-)
billybob 16y ago
I'd say they're more like a series of tubes.

bnegreve 16y ago

One should forward this document to microsoft.

sandGorgon 16y ago

I asked this previously on SO - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3121385/is-it-possible-to-make-something-like-osx-services-for-linux-by-leveraging-pipes 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 ?

burgerbrain 16y 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.
- sandGorgon 16y 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.
  - georgieporgie 16y ago
    You keep asking the same question repeatedly, hoping that some magic combination of words will lead to a different answer. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/20/9341164.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/20/93411... UNIX pipes are only a tiny bit like OS X Services from a user's perspective. They are nothing alike from a program's perspective. As others have said, UNIX pipes simply connect one program's standard output to another program's standard input. That's all. It uses the exact same mechanism that would otherwise show information to you and accept input from you. OS X Services are a completely different, proprietary thing. It works via the 'Pasteboard' which is rather like a secondary clipboard. Apple created a specific interface which must be recognized by a program in order to supply OS X Services with data. This interface is wholly unrelated to the rest of the program's interfaces. OS X Services are much more akin to something that you would build on Windows using COM, like a Windows Explorer Shell Extension. If you wanted to recreate OS X Services on Linux, you would have to define some sort of new interface for exchanging data between applications, then convince developers around the world to add the new API into their programs.

api 16y 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 16y ago
Invention brings the idea to life. Innovation brings the ideas to market.

LogicHoleFlaw 16y 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?

klochner 16y ago
http://stackoverflow.com http://stackoverflow.com
tripa 16y ago
(echo;cat)|msmtp But yeah, stackoverflow.com
- LogicHoleFlaw 16y ago
  That works perfectly. Thank you. Sorry for the noise.

tastybites 16y ago

Glad they chose 'pipe' over 'hose'.