"|" is not a "pipe" - or is it?

[Ken d'Albenas <kendal -at- AUTOTROL -dot- CUC -dot- AB -dot- CA>]

Well, the subject line probably got one or two people's
attention, while everyone else yawned, hit the DELETE button,
and moved on to the next piece of mail.

Okay, now that there are just two of us left, let's talk...

Once upon a time I called the vertical bar (|) a pipe in some
of my documentation.  My programmers were unanimous that this
was wrong.

The reason had to do with function.  Their objection to
calling it a "pipe" was that this is restricted to a
particular use of the character, namely, to concatenate
commands, "piping" the output of one operation into the next
operation.

Apollo's Aegis had this ability, Unix does, others do too.
  Example: "ps -auwwx | grep kendal"

However, what I was documenting at the time was an ascii file
that used vertical bars as field delimiters.  Not as piping
operators.
  Examples:   Field 1 data|Field 2 data|Field 3 data
              Field 1 data     |  Field 2 data  | Field 3 data

The vertical bar kind of looks like a length of pipe, but if
an operating system were to use a different character, say "%",
to pipe output from one command to another, then "%" would be
the piping character.  I could see the ambiguity that would
arise from calling "|" a pipe.  Call it a "vertical bar," they
all told me, and you won't go wrong.

If someone wants to take issue with what my programmers said,
I'm all ears.



Cheers,

Ken d'Albenas                  (not Kendal Stitzel)
(-::
Replies to: kendal -at- autotrol -dot- cuc -dot- ab -dot- ca
Flames to:  kendal@/dev/null

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"If we always do what we've always done,
 we'll always get what we've always gotten."
  - Adam Urbanski, President, Rochester School Board
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