plumbing

n. [Unix] Term used for shell code, so called because of the prevalence of
pipelines that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under
Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a
suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a
shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the
capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other
OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp.: used in the
construction hairy plumbing (see hairy ). You can kluge together a basic
spell-checker out of sort (1) , comm (1) , and tr (1) with a little
plumbing. See also tee.

