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Chaining Commands with Pipes

A pipe | sends the output of one command into the next one. It lets you build small tools out of simple commands.

Examplebash
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/ $

Chain as many as you like. Here ls feeds grep, which feeds wc -l to count the lines.

Examplebash
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/ $

Useful filters to pipe into: grep (keep matching lines), sort (-r reverses), wc -l (count lines), head -n 2 and tail -n 2 (first or last lines).

Quick check

What does `ls | wc -l` print?

Your turn: write the code

words.txt is created for you. Use a pipe to print only its alphabetically first word.

Finish the quick check (and any code exercise) to complete this lesson, or mark it done yourself.

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