How to pipe the output of one command to another in Linux

Even though I could spend the rest of my days with Linux and never touch the command line, I still opt to work with the terminal because it’s not only efficient, but it has a lot of really handy tricks I can use. One such trick is called “piping.”

Effectively, piping is taking the output of the first command and using it in the next command. And you can do this with as much piping as you like. You can pipe the output of Command A to Command B, and then pipe the output of Command B to Command C, and then pipe the output of Command C to Command D…etc.

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Piping sends data from one command to be used by the next in sequence — and it continues doing so until you’ve run the final command, with the data always flowing from right to left. That’s an important piece of information, and the flow of data piping is always in one way. 

How to use piping in Linux

What you’ll need: Piping in the Linux command line works on every Linux distribution, which means all you need is a running instance of any Linux distribution. 

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The syntax of a piped command looks like this:

Command 1 | Command 2 | Command 3

The | character indicates the piping, and bash reads it as such.

Let’s first talk about the commands we’ll pipe together.

In that file, paste the following:

Orange
Yellow
Red
Blue
Green
Purple
Black
Pink

Save and close the file.

The output should look like this:

Black
Blue
Green
Orange
Pink
Purple
Red
Yellow

Instead of running these commands separately, we can use a combination of && and | to do this on one line. I’ve already discussed how to combine Linux commands for a more efficient experience using the && characters. We’ll make use of that technique with our piping command.

touch colors.txt && echo -e "Orange\nYellow\nRed\nBlue\nGreen\nPurple\nBlack\nPink" >> colors

What you see above uses the -e option to inform the echo command to interpret escape sequences. In this case, the \n escape sequence creates a new line after each color. 

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Before that, we use the touch command to create the new file. So, the file is created and then content is added, one line at a time.

touch colors.txt && echo -e "Orange\nYellow\nRed\nBlue\nGreen\nPurple\nBlack\nPink" >> colors.txt && cat colors.txt | sort

The output of the above command should look like this:

Black
Blue
Green
Orange
Pink
Purple
Red
Yellow

One thing to keep in mind here is the only piping done in the above command is cat colors.txt | sort. The output of the cat colors.txt command is sent to the sort command, which displays the results. 

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And that’s how piping works with the Linux command line. This is a very handy trick you can use to make working with the command line even more efficient.