Redirection and Pipes
Redirection
We can move around the output of our commands to be the input of another command. For instance we can take the output of one file and add it to another with the > symbol:
cat new_file > super_new_file
cat super_new_file
output
Hello World
Here we looked at the contents of new_file and put those contents in a new file which we called super_new_file. However, be careful with the > symbol as it will overwrite the contents of files. If we just wanted to append the contents we can use >> symbol (much safer option):
cat new_file >> super_new_file
cat super_new_file
output
Hello World
Hello World
Piping
So far we have entered commands separately, but we can actually take the output of one command and use it as the input for another with the | symbol! Here we will use the cat command to look at the contents of meta.txt then use the command wc (word count) to get the number of lines, words and characters
cat new_file | wc
output
1 2 12
Just to note, that you can use wc new_file to get the same result, this is just an example of how to pipe the output of one command into another.