Unix processes were designed to be piped together

The Unix operating system became popular because it was very flexible and robust to tackle a lot of early needs in computing.

The unix command tools like:

• sed - stream editor

• grep - pattern matching program

Could be streamed together to do many different things in a flexible way. The unifying idea of that one could pipe the output of one command line process into another one and be able to handle very large amounts data in streaming way. See chunked encoding for an analogy.

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