{"id":228984,"date":"2026-03-28T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/28\/this-one-linux-shell-character-made-me-feel-like-a-hacker\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T17:25:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T21:25:09","slug":"this-one-linux-shell-character-made-me-feel-like-a-hacker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/28\/this-one-linux-shell-character-made-me-feel-like-a-hacker\/","title":{"rendered":"This one Linux shell character made me feel like a hacker"},"content":{"rendered":"

This one Linux shell character made me feel like a hacker<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/tech.yahoo.com\/computing\/articles\/one-linux-shell-character-made-113016289.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-03-28 07:30:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: tech.yahoo.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Like many people using Unix-like operating systems for the first time, I was introduced to the concept of the pipeline. Here’s how a single character on the command line changed everything.<\/p>\n

What is the pipe (|) character?<\/h2>\n

Building programs from other programs<\/h3>\n

The pipleline character, or |, sends the output of one Linux command to the input of another. It was originally developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s. I was introduced to this in a book on Unix on what was then called “Mac OS X.” This simple character changed everything.<\/p>\n

A good example of a pipeline is searching the output of a program for some string. Suppose I wanted to find out which processes on the system belonged to root. I would display all of the processes running on the system with the “ps aux” command and send that output to grep, searching for “root”<\/p>\n

ps aux | grep root<\/span><\/p>\n

The concept was invented by Doug McIllroy. At the time, Unix was actually considered user-friendly because you typed commands into a terminal instead of punching up a deck of computer cards to hand to an operator in the computer center and wait to receive your results (and your inevitable errors).<\/p>\n

The latter was called “batch mode,” and it was how mainframe computers were used since their inception.<\/p>\n

Pipelines make use of a concept in Unix and modern Linux systems of “standard input\/output.” The standard input is the keyboard, and the standard output is the terminal. There’s also a “standard error” for error messages. This is also the terminal. You can “redirect” standard input. I’d seen this concept when trying to follow along with a C++ book, but it made a lot more sense to me when I started using the Linux command line.<\/p>\n

You can save the output to a file for later with the (greater than) symbol:<\/p>\n

ps aux allprocs<\/p>\n

Or you can feed the contents of a file to another program with the<\/p>\n

cat <\/p>\n

The “software tools” idea<\/h2>\n

The vibe coding of the ’70s?<\/h3>\n

This approach might be simple, but it was a kind of manifesto. Instead of building monolithic programs,…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This one Linux shell character made me feel like a hacker https:\/\/tech.yahoo.com\/computing\/articles\/one-linux-shell-character-made-113016289.html Publish Date: 2026-03-28…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":228985,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/ny\/api\/res\/1.2\/7B8T3VcAzi5MFBVmGtblEw--\/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyMDA7aD02NzU-\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/how_to_geek_999\/08f4b5e85f7201b533a76914944de9a3","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[35,71],"class_list":["post-228984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-hacker","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228986,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228984\/revisions\/228986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}