I’ve used pipes for years and had a pretty good understanding of how the system calls of each process in the pipeline interacts with their own `sdin` and `stdou

I’ve used pipes for years and had a pretty good understanding of how the system calls of each process in the pipeline interacts with their own `sdin` and `stdout` file descriptors but this article puts it all together really nicely with some good examples. I don’t mind the useless use of `cat` as it can enhance readability for some people. However, I would suggest replacing the Bash while loop with a for loop: ls *.flac | while read song do flac -d "$song" --stdout | lame -V2 - "$song".mp3 done for song in *.flac do flac -d "$song" --stdout | lame -V2 - "$song".mp3 done Using Bash’s file globbing avoids problems with enumerating the output of `ls` [1]. It also avoids an unnecessary Bash sub-shell being spawned for the while loop that follows the first pipe. More importantly, I think it’s a lot more readable while still demonstrating how pipes can be efficiently used to process any amount of FLAC files. [1] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs