Redirection and pipes — Basics of Bash

Important notes

1. Redirections operate on standard input and output (STDIN, STDOUT). Read more about standard input/ouput here or just google "unix stdin stdout".
2. In addition to >, which directs an output into a file, there is also >>, which appends the file, or, in other words, adds stuff to the end of the file.
3. wc is used to count characters, words and lines. wc -l counts lines only.
4. uniq eliminates repeated lines (outputs the file with adjacent identical lines collapsed to one). It only works when repeated lines come together in a single continuous block. Example: sort file.txt | uniq

Lesson notes

• > to redirect an output into a file (e.g. ls /var/logs > logs.txt)
• < to redirect a file (e.g. sort < names.txt)
• | to connect two commands with a pipe (e.g. ls | grep)

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