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Lesson 23 / 31

Pipes & xargs

Chain commands with pipes and turn output into arguments with xargs for flexible one-liners.

| chains commands

A pipe feeds one command's stdout as the next command's stdin, so small tools combine into a pipeline.

ps aux | grep nginx | wc -l

Output:

2

xargs — turn lines into arguments

xargs takes lines from stdin and passes them as arguments to another command — useful when a command doesn't read stdin itself.

find . -name "*.tmp" | xargs rm

Quick check: What does the `|` operator do?

  • Runs two commands in parallel
  • Comments out the rest of the line
  • Sends one command's output as the next command's input
  • Creates a hard link
Answer

Sends one command's output as the next command's input — That's exactly what a pipe does — connect stdout to the next command's stdin.