Learn Bash streams, pipes and redirects, from beginner to advanced.

• Standard streams
  • Standard input
  • Standard output
  • Standard error
• Redirection
• Pipelines
• Named pipes
• Command grouping
• Process Substitution
• Subshells
• Examples
• Contributing
• License

A data stream in the context of Bash is a communication channel between a program and the environment where the command was launched from.

There are three data standard streams that are created when a command is launched.

The three streams are:

• stdin - standard input
• stdout - standard output
• stderr - standard error

Further more:

• The standard input stream accepts text as it's input.
• The text output from the command is sent to the shell though the standard output stream.
• Error messages from the command is sent to the shell through the standard error stream.

These data streams are treated as files meaning you read from them and write to them as if they are regular files. Files are identified by a unique number called a file descriptor, which the process uses to perform read/write operations.

When a command is launched, the first three file descriptors are allocated for the standard streams in the TTY. A TTY is the input/output environment, which is the terminal. This is different than a shell, which refers to the command-line interpreter.

Standard stream file descriptors:

• 0: stdin
• 1: stdout
• 2: stderr

File descriptor 0 is dedicated for standard input, 1 for standard output, and 2 for standard error.

File descriptors are maintained under /proc/$pid/fd where $pid is the process id. The current process can be referenced by /proc/self/fd.

The locations of these file descriptors are in /proc/self/fd/0, /proc/self/fd/1, and /proc/self/fd/2 respectively.

$ ls -la /proc/self/fd
total 0
dr-x------ 2 mota mota  0 Sep 29 16:13 ./
dr-xr-xr-x 9 mota mota  0 Sep 29 16:13 ../
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 29 16:13 0 -> /dev/pts/9
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 29 16:13 1 -> /dev/pts/9
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 29 16:13 2 -> /dev/pts/9
lr-x------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 29 16:13 3 -> /proc/815170/fd/
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 29 16:13 6 -> /dev/pts/9

Bash forks a child process when launching a command and inherits the file descriptors from the parent process.

We can use $$ to get the parent process ID:

$ echo $$
2317356

$ ps -p $$
    PID TTY          TIME CMD
2317356 pts/9    00:00:00 bash

Listing /proc/$$/fd will print the same information as before when using self because the $$ is expanded to the same process ID:

$ ls -la /proc/$$/fd
total 0
dr-x------ 2 mota mota  0 Sep 27 19:33 ./
dr-xr-xr-x 9 mota mota  0 Sep 27 19:33 ../
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 27 19:33 0 -> /dev/pts/9
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 27 19:33 1 -> /dev/pts/9
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 27 19:33 2 -> /dev/pts/9
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 28 12:20 255 -> /dev/pts/9
lrwx------ 1 mota mota 64 Sep 27 19:33 6 -> /dev/pts/9

In the above examples, /dev/pts/9 is referencing the pseudo terminal device. A pts is a pseudo terminal device emulated by another program, such as xterm, tmux, ssh, etc.

Type the tty command to see the pts device path.

$ tty
/dev/pts/9

You'll see a different number if you open up a new terminal window because it's a new terminal device:

$ tty
/dev/pts/11

If we we're on a native terminal device (non-pseudo) meaning the backend is hardware or kernel emulated (e.g. the console before launching the desktop environment), then the tty path will look something like /dev/tty1.

The file descriptor table looks like this, where the standard streams are reading/writing from the TTY.

• 0 -> /dev/pts/9
• 1 -> /dev/pts/9
• 2 -> /dev/pts/9

We can write data to the stdout file descriptor and you'll see it be printed back at you:

$ echo "hello world" > /proc/self/fd/1
hello world

Same thing will occur if writing to the stderr file descriptor:

$ echo "hello world" > /proc/self/fd/2
hello world

We can read from from the stdin file descriptor and echo the input:

$ echo $(</proc/self/fd/0)
a
b
c
d
a b c d

After running the command and typing text, press ctrl-d to stop reading from stdin. The inputed text will be printed.

If you're not familar with the $(...) syntax, it allows you to use the result of the command as the the string argument since $() evaluates the expression. The < is the standard input redirect operator which we'll go over in the redirection section.

For convenience, the file descriptor path is symlinked to /dev/fd.

$ ls -l /dev/fd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Aug 26 23:14 /dev/fd -> /proc/self/fd

For convenience, the standard streams are symlinked to /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, and /dev/stderr respectively.

$ ls -l /dev/std*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Aug 26 23:14 /dev/stderr -> /proc/self/fd/2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Aug 26 23:14 /dev/stdin -> /proc/self/fd/0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Aug 26 23:14 /dev/stdout -> /proc/self/fd/1

These are the same:

• /dev/stdin -> /proc/self/fd/0
• /dev/stdout -> /proc/self/fd/1
• /dev/stderr -> /proc/self/fd/2

The symlinks are considered POSIX extensions, so they might not be available in all POSIX compliant systems.

Redirection operators allow control of where input and output streams should go. When you see > it means redirection. The following are some of the redirect operators in Bash:

• > - redirect output, overwriting target if exists
• >> - redirect output, appending instead of overwriting if target exists
• &#> - redirect file descriptor #, where # is the identifier
• < - redirect input

Standard streams are can be referenced by their file descriptor identifiers. An ampersand & followed by the identifier number, ie &1, references a file descriptor when redirecting.

For example:

• command 1> out.log - outputs file descriptor 1 (stdout) to file.
• command 2> out.log - outputs file descriptor 2 (stderr) to file.
• command 3> out.log - outputs file descriptor 3 (a custom file descriptor) to file.

Common redirects:

• 1> - redirects stdout only. This is also the same as simply doing >
• 2> - redirects stderr only
• 2>&1 - redirects stderr to stdout. The 2> is redirecting the standard error output into file descriptor 1 which is standard out. The final output will contain both stdout and stderr output, if any.
• '&>' - redirect stdout and stderr. THis is also the same as the above 2>&1

For example:

• command 2>&1 > out.log - says "point output of FD #2 to FD #1, and ouput FD #1 to out file".

The reason an ampersand is required is because command 2>1 would be ambiguous; it wouldn't be clear if it was redirecting to file descriptor 1 or to a filename named 1, so the & is required to explicitly reference it as the file descriptor.

Do note that &1 (file descriptor 1) is different than a single & (run in background) and double && (AND operator). The ampersand has different meaning depending on the way it's used.

Other redirect operators (this will be explained in later sections):

• << - "Here documents", a special-purpose code block
• <<< - "Here strings", a striped-down form of a here document.

Example: demonstration of the different redirect operators:

Write stdout output of ls list format to list.txt file:

$ ls
archive.zip book.pdf notes.txt

$ ls -l > list.txt

$ cat list.txt
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:17 archive.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:17 book.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:19 list.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:17 notes.txt

Append new stdout output of ls showing hidden files to same list.txt file:

$ ls -a
. .. archive.zip  book.pdf  .cache  .config  notes.txt

$ ls -a >> list.txt
$ cat list.txt
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:17 archive.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:17 book.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:19 list.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Sep 30 14:17 notes.txt
.
..
archive.zip
book.pdf
.cache
.config
list.txt
notes.txt

Search for particular filenames and write errors from stderr to errors.txt file:

$ ls *.json
ls: cannot access '*.json': No such file or directory

$ ls *.json 2> errors.txt

$ cat errors.txt
ls: cannot access '*.json': No such file or directory

Read errors.txt file as input to the less command:

$ less < errors.txt

ls: cannot access '*.json': No such file or directory
errors.txt (END)

stdin (standard input) is an input stream where input data is sent to. The program reads the stream data as input for the program. stdin is a file descriptor we can write to. In most cases the standard input is input from the keyboard.

The stdin file descriptor is located at /proc/self/fd/0 but we can use the symlink /dev/stdin as well.

Data to be sent to program as input is redirected with <:

command < input.txt

Example: Read stdin as input for bash script:

program.sh:

while read line
do
  echo "hello $line"
done < /dev/stdin

Create file with names:

$ printf "alice\nbob\n" > file.txt

Run program:

$ chmod  x program.sh
$ ./program.sh < file.txt
hello alice
hello bob

Example: For stdin demonstration purposes, you can send file data as input to the echo command by reading the file into a subshell and using the result as the echo arguments:

$ echo "hello world" > file.txt
$ echo $(< file.txt)
hello world

stdout (standard output) is an output stream where data is sent to and then outputted by the terminal. stdout is a file descriptor we can write to.

The stdout file descriptor is located at /proc/self/fd/1 but we can use the symlink /dev/stdout as well.

The standard output of a program is redirect with 1> or simply just >:

command > stdout.log

The above is the same as command 1> stdout.log

Example: Redirect stdout to a file:

$ echo "hello world" > stdout.log
$ cat stdout.log
hello world

Trying to write to a file that can't be opened for writing will make the command fail:

$ touch stdout.log
$ chmod -w stdout.log
$ echo "hello world" > stdout.log
bash: stdout.log: Permission denied

Sometimes when we aren't interested in the program stdout output, we can redirected to /dev/null to silence the output. This device file acts like a black hole for data streams.

command > /dev/null

stderr (standard error) is an output stream where error data is sent to and then outputted by the terminal. stderr is a file descriptor we can write to.

The stderr file descriptor is located at /proc/self/fd/2 but we can use the symlink /dev/stderr as well.

The standard error of a program is redirect with 2>:

command 2> stdout.log

Example: Redirect stdout to the stderr file descriptor. stderr messages are outputted to the terminal:

$ echo "hello world" > /dev/stderr
hello world

Example: Redirect the standard error messages to a file.

Redirecting with only > captures stdout and not stderr:

$ ls /foo > out.log
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory
$ cat out.log

We use 2> to redirect stderr only:

$ ls /foo 2> out.log
$ cat out.log
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory

Of course now the following won't write anything to the file because there is no error:

$ ls /home 2> out.log
mota/
$ cat out.log

We can use 2>&1 to redirect stderr to stdout, and then redirect stdout to the file with > (or >> to append):

$ ls /home > out.log 2>&1
$ cat out.log
mota/

$ ls /foo >> out.log 2>&1
$ cat out.log
mota/
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory

Alternatively, we can redirect stdout to stderr with 1>&2 (or simply >&2), and then redirect stderr to the file with 2> (or 2>> to append):

$ ls /home 2> out.log 1>&2
$ cat out.log
mota/

$ ls /foo 2>> out.log 1>&2
$ cat out.log
mota/
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory

Since > is shorthand for 1>, we can replace 1>&2 with >&2 and it'll work the same.

Order is important!

The following is what probably seems more intuitive but it won't work as you'd expect:

$ ls /foo 2>&1 > out.log
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory
$ cat out.log

It didn't write to the file, and the reason is because stderr was made a copy of stdout before stdout was redirected to the file. It's assigning the right operand to the left operand by copy and not by reference.

Basically the above example is redirecting stderr to whatever stdout currently is (the TTY screen in this case) and then redirects stdout to the file.

Moving the stderr redirect operator 2>&1 to after the stdout > part correctly copies the error stream to the output stream which is redirecting to the file.

We already learned about the > shorthand for 1>. There's another shorthand for redirecting stderr to stdout to a file or file descriptor. The redirection > file 2>&1 can be shorthanded to &>

$ ls /home &> out.log
$ cat out.log
mota/

$ ls /foo &>> out.log
$ cat out.log
mota/
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory

Using the | pipe operator allows you to send the output of one program as input to another program.

command 1 | command2

A basic example is filtering output of a program. For example, to only display files that end in .txt

$ ls
archive.zip   book.pdf   data.txt  My_Notes.txt

$ ls | grep "\.txt$"
data.txt
My_Notes.txt

You can chain multiple commands creating a pipeline:

command 1 | command 2 | command3

Example: Add additional lowercase command:

$ ls | grep "\.txt$" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'
data.txt
my_notes.txt

It's important to note that the commands in pipelines, ie cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3, are all launched in parallel and not ran sequentially. The inputs and outputs are configured appropriately for each program

For running a series of commands in sequential order then use the following operators:

• && - run command if the last one did not fail (zero exit status code)
• || - run command if the last one failed (non-zero exit status code)
• ; - run command regardless of the last exit code

The AND operator && (double ampersand) is used for separating commands and only running the command if the previous on succeeds:

command1 && command2

Example: Continue if condition is true. The test command returns exit code 0 if the condition is true.

$ test 2 -lt 5 && echo "yes"
yes

If the test condition is false then the circuit breaks because the exit code is non-zero and the execution order doesn't reach the echo command:

$ test 7 -lt 5 && echo "yes"

You can chain as many commands as you need:

command1 && command2 && command3

It's important to not confuse the && double ampersand with a single & ampersand since they do very different things. The single ampersand is used for launching the command list in the background. See "&" section.

The OR operator || (double pipe) is used for separating commands and only running the command if the previous one failed:

command1 || command2

Example: Continue if condition is false. The test command returns a non-zero exit code if the condition is false.

$ test 7 -lt 5 || echo "yes"
yes

If the test condition is true and exit code is 0 then the execution will stop at the OR statement:

$ test 2 -lt 5 || echo "yes"

Commands separated by a ; are executed sequentially: one after another. The shell waits for the finish of each command.

 # command2 will be executed after command1
 command1 ; command2

The single ampersand is used for launching a command or command list in a new subshell in the background. The operator & must be at the end of the command:

command &

Example: Run program in background. This command is will be immediately launched in the background and after 5 seconds it will display a desktop notification:

$ sleep 5 && notify-send "hello world" &
[1] 2481042

After running a command with & you'll see the job ID and process ID returned. Run jobs to see the list of running processes launched in the background.

$ jobs
[1]   Running                 sleep 5 && notify-send "hello world" &

After the command has completed and exited, the status will change to done:

$ jobs
[1]   Done                    sleep 5 && notify-send "hello world"

Use the -l flag to list the process ID as well:

$ jobs -l
[1]  2481042 Done                 sleep 5 && notify-send "hello world"

If the command hasn't completed yet, you can bring to the foreground with the fg command:

$ fg 1
sleep 5 && notify-send "hello world"

Notice how there's no & at the end because the process is no longer running in the background.

Example: Launch bash scripts or executible files in the background:

$ cat > program.sh
sleep 5 && notify-send "hello world"
^D
$ chmod  x program.sh
$ ./program.sh &

The mkfifo allows us to create a special type of file, a FIFO file, which can be opened for writing and reading and behave similar to a pipe. These files are referred to as named pipes.

The difference between a FIFO file and a regular file is that the FIFO file must be opened on both ends at the same time to let the program continue with input or output operations. The data is passed internally through the kernel without writing it to the file system (the file size is always 0 bytes). This means reading from the FIFO file will be blocked until it's opened for writing, and writing to it will be blocked will until it's opened for reading.

Example: create a named piped for writing and reading

First we create the named pipe with mkfifo:

$ mkfifo mypipe

Listing the file information shows us that it's a pipe because the file type letter in the attributes is p

$ ls -l mypipe
prw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 0 Oct 25 02:14 mypipe

In one terminal, we redirect some standard output to the named pipe:

$ echo "hello world" > mypipe

Notice how it appears to hang after running the command. The pipe is blocked until another process reads from the pipe.

In another terminal, redirect standard input of the pipe into cat to read and print the contents that were sent to the pipe in the first terminal. This also unblocks the pipe since both ends are simultaneously opened.

$ cat < mypipe
hello world

The FIFO device file is on disk so we have to manually delete it if we're done using it:

$ rm mypipe

Another option is to create FIFO files in /tmp which will get automatically wiped after a restart.

Commands can be grouped using curly braces {...}

$ { command; command; command; }

Important! there must be a space separating the command and the curly brace and the last command needs to be terminated by a semicolon for the group to be executed correctly.

Another way to group commands is by using a subshell (...).

$ (command; command; command)

Grouping with subshells does not require the space separation and last command semicolon as like grouping with curly braces. There are differences in grouping using a subshell and subshells are explained further in the subshells section

Grouping commands is useful for managing redirection. For example, we can redirect the output of multiple programs to a single location without adding redudant redirects.

For context:

$ ls
data.json  list.txt
$ cat list.txt
archive.zip
book.pdf

We can take file write redirects like these:

$ date > out.log
$ ls >> out.log
$ cat list.txt >> out.log
$ cat out.log
Sat Oct 10 09:35:06 PM PDT 2020
data.json
list.txt
out.log
archive.zip
book.pdf

Group them to simplify things:

$ { date; ls; cat list.txt; } > out.log
$ cat out.log
Sat Oct 10 09:35:06 PM PDT 2020
data.json
list.txt
out.log
archive.zip
book.pdf

A command group can be piped to another command as if it were a single standard input:

$ { date; ls; cat list.txt; } | tail -n 2 | sort
archive.zip
book.pdf
data.json
list.txt

Similarly, grouping can be done with a subshell:

$ (date; ls; cat list.txt) | tail -n 2 | sort
archive.zip
book.pdf
data.json
list.txt

By default, a bash pipeline's exit status code will be whichever exit code the last command returned, meaning a non-zero exit code is not preserved throughout the pipeline.

Example: here we have a program that has a failing pipeline however the exit code is 0. The last exit code can be read from the variable $?.

$ cat > program.sh
ls /foo | tee out.log; echo $?
echo "done"
^D
$ chmod  x program.sh
$ ./program.sh
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory
0
done

The bash set builtin command allows us to configure shell options. One important option is the set -o pipefail option which causes the pipeline's exit code to be preserved if a command fails in the pipeline:

$ cat > program.sh
set -o pipefail
ls /foo | tee out.log; echo $?
echo "done"
^D
$ chmod  x program.sh
$ ./program.sh
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory
2
done

The ls man page mentions the following reasons for exit status codes:

• 0 - if OK
• 1 - if minor problems
• 2 - if serious trouble

Notice how the last echo command still got executed after the pipeline failed. We can combine the pipefail option with the set -e (errexit) option to immediately exit the script if any command fails:

$ cat > program.sh
set -eo pipefail
ls /foo | tee out.log; echo $?
echo "done"
^D
$ chmod  x program.sh
$ ./program.sh
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory

The program exited immediately after the failing ls command and didn't print any commands after it.

Process substitution allows us to run a program and write to another program as if it were a file. The syntax for process substitution is >(command) for writing to the program as an output file or <(command) for using the program as an input file.

• <(command) - for programs that produce standard output
• >(command) - for programs that intake standard input

The operator <() or >() creates a temporary file descriptor that manages reading and writing the substituted program.

It's important that theres no space between the < or > and the parentheses ( otherwise it would result in an error. Although it looks similar, process substitution is different than command grouping or subshells.

Example: Print the file descriptor created by process substitution:

We can use the echo command to view the result of the expansion:

$ echo <(date)
/dev/fd/63

Example: Print the contents of the file created by process substitution:

$ cat <(date)
Sat Oct 10 12:56:18 PM PDT 2020

Example: command tee stdout to cat

The tee command accepts only files to write to but using process substitution we can write the output to cat. This results in the date command being printed and the cat command printing the date as well.

$ date | tee >(cat)
Sat Oct 10 01:27:15 PM PDT 2020
Sat Oct 10 01:27:15 PM PDT 2020

Example: send command stderr to substituted file while also logging stdout and stderr:

command 2> tee >(cat >&2)

The >() operator substitute the tee command as a file and within that process substitution the cat command is substituted as a file so tee can write to it. The 2> operator sends only stderr to outer substituted file. The operator >&2 copies stdout to stderr.

If there is no stderr from the command then nothing is sent to the tee substituted file:

$ ls /home 2> >(tee >(cat >&2))
mota/

If there is stderr from the command then the tee process substitution will process it and log it:

$ ls /foo 2> >(tee >(cat >&2))
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/foo': No such file or directory

A subshell executes commands in a child copy of the current shell. The environment is copied to the new instance of the shell when running subshelled commands. The copy of the environment is deleted once the subshell exits so changes, such as environment variables assignments, in the subhsell are lost when it exits. Command grouping is preferred to subshells in most cases because it's faster and uses less memory.

Wrap the command(s) in parentheses (...) to launch them in a subshell:

$ (command)

Example: running a command in a subshell:

Notice how the second environment variable echo is not printed because the variable was set in the subshell environment:

$ (FOO=bar; echo $FOO); echo $FOO
bar

Example: using process substitution to get around subshell caveats:

As an example, the read command can be used for caching input. The read input is copied to the $REPLY environment variable.

$ read
hello world
$ echo $REPLY
hello world

However if we pipe a string to the read command, it will not print the string as expected after reading it:

$ echo "hello world" | read
$ echo $REPLY

This is because read command is launched in a subshell when it's in a pipeline and the REPLY variable copy is lost after it exits. Commands in pipelines are executed in subshell and any variable assignments will not be available after the subshell terminates.

We can use process substitution to get around this problem so a subshell doesn't to be initialized:

$ read < <(echo "hello world")
$ echo $REPLY
hello world

The following are various examples utilizing bash pipelines and redirections:

# will echo message only if command is not found
$ command -v mycommand &>/dev/null || echo "command not found"

Copy stderr file descriptor #1 to stdout file descriptor #2:

echo "this will go to stderr" 1>&2

You can omit the 1 since > is the same as 1>:

echo "this will go to stderr" >&2

To make it more readable, the redirect can be moved to the front:

>&2 echo "this will go to stderr"

Diff the output of two commands using process substitution:

diff <(command) <(command)

Example 1:

$ diff <(xxd file1.bin) <(xxd file2.bin)

Example 2:

$ diff <(printf "foo\nbar/nqux\n") <(printf "foo\nbaz\nqux\n")

Use tee to record an SSH session:

ssh user@server | tee /path/to/file

Example:

$ ssh [email protected] | tee session.log

# after exiting server
$ cat session.log

Split a pipe into two separate pipes using tee and process substitution:

command | tee >(command)

Example 1: echo text and reverse the text in second stream:

$ echo "split this pipe" | tee >(rev)
split this pipe
epip siht tilps

You're not limited to just one; add as many additional streams as you like:

$ echo "split this pipe" | tee >(rev) >(tr ' ' '_') >(tr a-z A-Z)
split this pipe
SPLIT THIS PIPE
split_this_pipe
epip siht tilps

Example 2: Run command and copy output to clipboard:

$ echo "hello world" | tee >(copy)
hello world

Echo text from one TTY to another TTY:

command | /dev/pts/{id}

Example:

Terminal 1

$ tty
/dev/pts/39

Terminal 2

$ echo "this will show up in terminal 1" > /dev/pts/39

Pipe stdout and stderr output of current TTY to another TTY:

$ exec &> >(tee >(cat > /dev/pts/{id}))

Example:

Terminal 1

$ tty
/dev/pts/39

Terminal 2

$ exec &> >(tee >(cat > /dev/pts/39))

Another way is to use the script command. The script command allows you to record terminal sessions. Here we specify the TTY as the output file:

script -q /dev/pts/{id} command

Example:

Terminal 1:

$ tty
/dev/pts/12

Terminal 2:

$ script -q /dev/pts/12 bash

$ read varname < <(command)

Example:

$ read myvar < <(echo "hello world")

$ echo $myvar
hello world

command | tee /dev/fd/{id}

Example:

$ echo "hello world" | tee /dev/fd/3

However, the above won't work on all systems. The cross-platform compatible way is to use process substitution:

$ command > >(tee >(cat >&3))

Set stdin as input file:

while read line
do
  echo "echo: $line"
done < /dev/stdin

Example:

$ cat | reader.sh

while read line
do
  echo "$line"
done < <(command)

Example:

while true; do date; sleep 1; done > stream.log

while read line
do
  echo "$line"
done < <(tail -n0 -f stream.log)

Another way of reading command output line by line:

command | while read line
do
  echo "$line"
done

Example:

tail -n0 -f stream.log | while read line
do
  echo "$line"
done

Pipe your terminal to an open TCP socket file descriptor:

$ exec 3<>/dev/tcp/{hostname}/{port} && exec &> >(tee >(cat >&3))

Example:

Terminal 1

$ nc -l -p 1337

Terminal 2

$ exec 3<>/dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/1337 && exec &> >(tee >(cat >&3))

Alternatively, you can use netcat to pipe your terminal:

$ exec &> >(nc 127.0.0.1 1337)

{ command1; command2; command3; } > stdout.log 2> stderr.log

Example:

$ { date ; echo "ok"; >&2 echo "error!"; } > stdout.log 2> stderr.log

$ cat stdout.log
Sat 29 Aug 2020 11:16:39 AM PDT

$ cat stderr.log
error!

Stream audio to terminal audio player:

curl -s {http-stream-url} | mpv -

Example: Streaming mp3 audio from somafm to mpv player:

$ curl -s http://ice1.somafm.com/defcon-128-mp3 | mpv -

Example: Using afplay player (preinstalled on macOS). Note afplay doesn't support streaming so we create a file descriptor to stream to.

$ exec 3<> /tmp/file.mp3 && curl -s http://ice1.somafm.com/defcon-128-mp3 | tee >&3 | (sleep 1; afplay /tmp/file.mp3)

Example: using ffplay player (preinstalled on Fedora):

$ curl -s http://ice1.somafm.com/defcon-128-mp3 | ffplay -nodisp -

Example: Using youtube-dl to get the m3u8 playlist url for mpv to stream:

$ youtube-dl -f best -g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ | xargs -I % curl -s % | mpv --no-video -

Server:

nc -l -s 0.0.0.0 -p 1337 | tar xf -

Client:

tar cf - /some/directory | nc {hostname} 1337

Example: pipe all content from current client directory to server:

Server:

$ nc -l -p 1337 | tar xf -

Client:

tar cf - . | nc 127.0.0.1 1337

A thing to note is that it'd be very easy to for someone to stream all your home directory contents (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc) if they're able to run this command on your machine! Only run trusted software and monitor outgoing HTTP requests using something like OpenSnitch.

Example: trigger a webcam picture to be taken when mouse movement events is read from /dev/input/mouse0, and wait 10 seconds before listening for another mouse event again:

while true; do sudo cat /dev/input/mouse0 | read -n1; streamer -q -o cam.jpeg -s 640x480 > /dev/null 2>&1; sleep 10; done

Group commands with OR operator to try different commands until one succeeds and pipe the result to the next command:

$ ( command || command || command ) | command

Example: attempt to deflate a gzipped file and pipe text to less:

$ echo "hello world" > stream.log; gzip stream.log; FILE=stream.log.gz
$ ( zcat $FILE || gzcat $FILE || bzcat2 $FILE ) | less
hello world

$ cat > file.txt
hello world
^D

$ cat file.txt
hello world

It's the same thing using the - argument in cat to indicate that you want to read from stdin, e.g. cat - > file.txt

Example: With cat can use the - in place of a file name to read from stdin. Press ctrl-d to exit the stdin prompt:

$ echo "hello" > 1.txt
$ echo "world" > 3.txt
$ cat 1.txt - 3.txt > all.txt
earth
^D

$ cat all.txt
hello
earth
world

Example: Set standard input of terminal to FIFO file

In terminal 1, create a FIFO file and replace terminal standard input by using exec:

$ mkfifo myfifo
$ exec < myfifo

In terminal 2, write to the FIFO file and see the command being executed in the first terminal. However, the first terminal will close right away. This is because the writer closed the FIFO and the reading process received EOF.

$ echo "ls -l" > myfifo

We can create a file descriptor with an open connection to the FIFO pipe to prevent the terminal from closing when writing commands to it.

In temrinal 1, run exec again to replace standard input:

$ exec < myfifo

In terminal 2, use exec to create a custom file descriptor 3 and redirect the standard output to the named pipe. Now we can echo commands to this file descriptor and the first terminal will execute them and remain opened.

$ exec 3> myfifo
$ echo "ls -l" >&3

Use the FD close operator {fd}>&- with exec to close the file descriptor opened for writing to the FIFO:

$ exec 3>&-

In this example, we'll create a program that will intake a filtered output of ls -l and print a formatted string.

Print long form of ls:

$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 2247 Oct 10 19:51 book.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota  465 Oct 10 19:51 data.txt

Strip out first line:

$ ls -l | tail -n 2
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota 2247 Oct 10 19:51 book.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mota mota  465 Oct 10 19:51 data.txt

Print only the size and filename columns:

$ ls -l | tail -n 2 | awk '{print $5 " " $9}'
2247 book.pdf
465 data.txt

Now that we know what filter pipeline we'll use, let's create a program that reads line by line the output of the pipeline through process substitution as standard input and prints a formatted string for every line:

program.sh

while read size filename; do
  cat << EOF
$filename is $size bytes
EOF
done < <(ls -l | tail -n 2 | awk '{print $5 " " $9}')

$ ./program.sh
book.pdf is 2247 bytes
data.txt is 465 bytes

Pull requests are welcome!

For contributions please create a new branch and submit a pull request for review.

• GNU Bash Manual - Redirections
• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: Process Substitution
• Introduction to Linux - I/O redirection
• The Linux Command Line
• Bash One-Liners Explained: All about redirections
• Bash Redirection Cheat Sheet

MIT @ Miguel Mota