4 ms·
50th Anniversary Of '|'
Apparently today is the 50th anniversary of using '|' for connecting shell pipelines. It was introduced in v4 of the Thompson shell, whose manpage is dated 1973-04-18 [1]. Previously the syntax for 'a | b' was `a >b>` [2].
[1]: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v4/
[2]: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v3/
- truecall 3y ago[dead]
- surprisetalk 3y agoHappy anniversary! I'm not sure if it's true, but I've heard that the inspiration for Unix pipes came from APL.
- AITree 3y agocongratulations on 50 th aniversary of "I"
- ralferoo 3y agoInteresting that both | and ^ were supported, but | took over and ^ is still unused by the shell. I wonder if ^ was deprecated because of the likelihood it'd be commonly used at the start of a regexp for grep, but | used to provide alternatives in a regexp was probably much less frequently used and so having to quote is was less of a problem than for ^. Also interesting that the v3 format had both input and output filters, which is just semantic repositioning of the commands.
- samstave 3y agoThe ' ^ ' should be used going forward by CLI AI wrappers to mean "use the above and then | to the following" So if you prompt, you can just "^ | table" to say "Now use the above and show me in a table." ; or just " ^ table " should suffice, ideally.
- deadly_syn 3y agoYou could try !! | some_command Should theoretically work as youre describing in bash today!