50th Anniversary Of '|'

#1

Post by nolta » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

Apparently today is the 50th anniversary of using '|' for connecting shell pipelines. It was introduced in v4 of the Thompson shell, whose manpage is dated 1973-04-18 [1]. Previously the syntax for 'a | b' was `a >b>` [2].

[1]: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v4/

[2]: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v3/

Re: 50th Anniversary Of '|'

#2

Post by truecall » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 5:43 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: 50th Anniversary Of '|'

#3

Post by surprisetalk » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

Happy anniversary!

I'm not sure if it's true, but I've heard that the inspiration for Unix pipes came from APL.

Re: 50th Anniversary Of '|'

#4

Post by AITree » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 9:39 AM UTC

congratulations on 50 th aniversary of "I"

Re: 50th Anniversary Of '|'

#5

Post by ralferoo » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 10:23 AM UTC

Interesting that both | and ^ were supported, but | took over and ^ is still unused by the shell.

I wonder if ^ was deprecated because of the likelihood it'd be commonly used at the start of a regexp for grep, but | used to provide alternatives in a regexp was probably much less frequently used and so having to quote is was less of a problem than for ^.

Also interesting that the v3 format had both input and output filters, which is just semantic repositioning of the commands.

Re: 50th Anniversary Of '|'

#6

Post by samstave » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

ralferoo wrote: post #5

Interesting that both | and ^ were supported, but | took over and ^ is still unused by the shell. I wonder if ^ was deprecated because of the likelihood it'd be commonly used at the start of a regexp for grep, but | used to provide alternatives in a regexp was probably much less frequently used and so having to quote is was less of a problem than for ^. Also interesting that the v3 format had both input and output fi…

The ' ^ ' should be used going forward by CLI AI wrappers to mean "use the above and then | to the following"

So if you prompt, you can just "^ | table" to say "Now use the above and show me in a table." ; or just " ^ table " should suffice, ideally.

Re: 50th Anniversary Of '|'

#7

Post by deadly_syn » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 10:44 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #6

ralferoo wrote: post #5

Interesting that both | and ^ were supported, but | took over and ^ is still unused by the shell. I wonder if ^ was deprecated because of the likelihood it'd be commonly used at the start of a regexp for grep, but | used to provide alternatives in a regexp was probably much less frequently used and so having to quote is was less of a problem than for ^. Also interesting that the v3 format had both input and output fi…

The ' ^ ' should be used going forward by CLI AI wrappers to mean "use the above and then | to the following" So if you prompt, you can just "^ | table" to say "Now use the above and show me in a table." ; or just " ^ table " should suffice, ideally.

You could try

!! | some_command

Should theoretically work as youre describing in bash today!