Pipelines
A pipeline is a sequence of one or more commands separated by one of the control operators | or |&. The
format for a pipeline is:
[time [-p]] [ ! ] command [ [|⎪|&] command2 ... ]
The standard output of command is connected via a pipe to the standard input of command2. This
connection is performed before any redirections specified by the command (see REDIRECTION below). If |&
is used, the standard error of command is connected to command2's standard input through the pipe; it is
shorthand for 2>&1 |. This implicit redirection of the standard error is performed after any
redirections specified by the command.
The return status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command, unless the pipefail option is
enabled. If pipefail is enabled, the pipeline's return status is the value of the last (rightmost)
command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if all commands exit successfully. If the reserved word
! precedes a pipeline, the exit status of that pipeline is the logical negation of the exit status as
described above. The shell waits for all commands in the pipeline to terminate before returning a value.
If the time reserved word precedes a pipeline, the elapsed as well as user and system time consumed by
its execution are reported when the pipeline terminates. The -p option changes the output format to that
specified by POSIX. When the shell is in posix mode, it does not recognize time as a reserved word if
the next token begins with a `-'. The TIMEFORMAT variable may be set to a format string that specifies
how the timing information should be displayed; see the description of TIMEFORMAT under Shell Variables
below.
When the shell is in posix mode, time may be followed by a newline. In this case, the shell displays the
total user and system time consumed by the shell and its children. The TIMEFORMAT variable may be used
to specify the format of the time information.
Each command in a pipeline is executed as a separate process (i.e., in a subshell).
|
-c Print only a count of matching lines.
-h Do not print file name tags (headers) with output lines.
-e The following argument is taken as a pattern. This option makes it easy to specify patterns that
might confuse argument parsing, such as -n.
-i Ignore alphabetic case distinctions. The implementation folds into lower case all letters in the
pattern and input before interpretation. Matched lines are printed in their original form.
-l (ell) Print the names of files with selected lines; don't print the lines.
-L Print the names of files with no selected lines; the converse of -l.
-n Mark each printed line with its line number counted in its file.
-s Produce no output, but return status.
-v Reverse: print lines that do not match the pattern.
-f The pattern argument is the name of a file containing regular expressions one per line.
-b Don't buffer the output: write each output line as soon as it is discovered.
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