plumbing

(Unix) Term used for shell code, so called because of the

prevalence of "pipelines" that feed the output of one

program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities

can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable

collection of pipelines and temporary file grinding

encapsulated in a shell script. This is much less effort

than writing C every time, and the capability is considered

one of Unix's major winning features. A few other operatingsystems such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities.

The tee utility is specifically designed for plumbing.

[Jargon File]

(1995-02-23)