Meaning – The term pipe, refers to a method used to pass information from one program process to another. Unlike other types of interprocess communication, a pipe only offers one-way communication by passing a parameter or output from one process to another. The information that is passed through the pipe is held by the system until it can be read by the receiving process.
A temporary software connection between two programs or commands. Normally, the operating system accepts input from the keyboard and sends output to the display screen. Sometimes, however, it is useful to use the output from one command as the input for a second command, without passing the data through the keyboard or display screen. Pipes were invented for these situations.
Example of usage – “In a Unix shell script, a pipe is specified by a vertical bar in the command line. The result of the first command sequence is used as the input for the second command sequence. Two pipes can be used to enable two-way communication.”
