How to Use Pipes and Named Pipes in Linux (with Examples)

One of the most powerful shell operators in Linux is the pipe. In this article, we will see how regular and named pipes work, how to use them, and how they differ from each other.

Pipes are one of Linux’s and Unix-like operating systems’ most valuable command-line capabilities. Pipes are utilized in a variety of applications. If you look at any Linux command line article, you’ll notice that pipes appear frequently.

The vertical bar symbol | denotes a pipe. Because of the pipe, you can take the output from one command and feed it to another command as input.

As a result, the output of one command can be used as the input for another, and the output of that command can be used as the input for the next command, and so on.

So you’re not limited to a single piped command. You can stack them as many times as you like.

In other words, a pipe is a form of redirection used in Linux to send the output of one program to another program for further processing. Pipes allow you to do operations that the shell does not support out of the box.

The syntax for the pipe or unnamed pipe command is the | character between any two commands:

command1 | command2 | ... | commandN

How Does a Pipe Work in Linux

To see how pipe works, let’s look at the examples below.

We have a directory full of many different types of files. So we want to know how many files of a particular kind are in this directory.

So we can get a list of files easily using the ls command:

ls -l

We’ll use grep to separate the types of files we’re looking for. For example, we seek files with the word txt in their name or as a file extension.

We will use the special shell character | to direct ls‘ output to grep.

ls | grep txt

As you can see from the image above, the output of the ls command was not sent to the terminal window.

Therefore the result is not displayed on the screen. Instead, it is instead redirected to the input of the grep command. The output we see above comes from grep, the last command in this chain.

Now, let’s start extending our chain. We can count files txt by adding the wc command to the chain. We will use the -l option (number of lines) with wc.

ls | grep txt | wc -l

In the example above, grep is no longer the last command in the chain, so we do not see its output. Instead, the output of grep is fed into the wc command.

The result that we see in the terminal window comes from wc. It reports two files, txt in the directory.

What Is a Named Pipe in Linux?

As the name itself suggests, these are pipes with names. One of the key differences between regular pipes and& named pipes is that named pipes have a presence in the file system. That is, they show up like files.

The named pipe in Linux is a method for passing information from one computer process to another using a pipe that is given a specific name. Named pipes are also known as FIFO, which stands for First In, First Out.

You can create a named pipe using the mkfifo command. For example:

mkfifo mypipe

You can tell if a file is a named pipe by the p bit in the file permissions section.

ls -l mypipe

prw-r--r--  1 root     root         0 Mar 20 12:58 mypipe

The named pipes are files on the file system itself. Unlike a standard pipe, a named pipe is accessed as part of the filesystem, just like any other file type.

The named pipe content resides in memory rather than being written to disk. So it is passed only when both ends of the pipe have been opened. And you can write to a pipe multiple times before it is opened at the other end and read.

Using named pipes lets you establish a process in which one process writes to a pipe, and another reads from a pipe without much concern about trying to time or carefully orchestrate their interaction.

To see how named pipes work, let’s look at the examples below. Let’s first create our named pipe:

mkfifo mypipe

Now let’s consume messages with this pipe.

tail -f mypipe

Open another terminal window, write a message to this pipe:

echo "hi" >> mypipe

Now in the first window, you can see the “hi” printed out:

tail -f pipe1
hi

Because it is a pipe and the message has been consumed, if we check the file size, you can see it is still 0:

ls -l mypipe

prw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 20 14:11 mypipe

Since a named pipe is just a Linux file, we can use the rm command to remove one. Therefore, to remove the pipe we created in the previous examples, we would run:

rm mypipe

When to Use Regular or Named Pipes

Using a regular pipe instead of a named pipe in Linux depends on the characteristics we’re looking for. Some can be persistence, two-way communication, having a filename, creating a filter, and restricting access permissions.

For example, if we want to filter the output of a command multiple times, using an anonymous pipe seems the most appropriate option.

On the other hand, if we need a filename and we don’t want to store data on disk, what we’re looking for is a named pipe.

In conclusion, the next time you’re working with commands at the Linux terminal and find yourself moving data between commands, hopefully, a pipe will make the process quick and easy.

Conclusion

This article showed you the versatility of pipes when used in Linux commands. It is, nevertheless, relatively simple, but it can resolve a wide range of complicated queries.

Furthermore, this command-line tool is simple and works with UNIX and Linux platforms.

For more about pipe command in Linux, consult its manual page.