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Development Tools Console Foundations Environment and Redirection Pipes and Redirection

Posted by Kalidh Mohamed
Kalidh Mohamed
5,995 Points

Console freezes when I type the command nano hi.txt | grep "this"

so the pipe symbol is used to pipe commands together. But when I try to use the output of nano hi.txt to grep, the console freezes up

nano hi.txt | grep "this"

3 Answers

Gunhoo Yoon
Gunhoo Yoon
5,027 Points
Gunhoo Yoon
Gunhoo Yoon
5,027 Points

It actually pipes something called stdout to stdin. So the operands must know how to send it and take it. In this case, nano probably won't send its output to terminal and your pipe is trapped somewhere in the middle. Try less or cat instead of nano less is probably more pleasant way to read documents in terminal.

Kalidh Mohamed
Kalidh Mohamed
5,995 Points
Kalidh Mohamed
Kalidh Mohamed
5,995 Points

I just tried this, but this time, it does nothing. It just goes to the next line on the prompt.

Gunhoo Yoon
Gunhoo Yoon
5,027 Points
Gunhoo Yoon
Gunhoo Yoon
5,027 Points

Tried what? less hi.txt | grep this ?

Kalidh Mohamed
Kalidh Mohamed
5,995 Points
Kalidh Mohamed
Kalidh Mohamed
5,995 Points

I just figured it out. What I was searching for was in lower case compared to what was in the file. Can't believe I overlooked something so silly :(