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
operating systems such as
IBM's
VM/CMS support similar facilities.
The
tee utility is specifically designed for plumbing.
[
Jargon File]
