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Redirection and Pipes
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.. admonition:: reading

   We will loosely follow the Software Carpentry `Pipes and Filters
   <https://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/04-pipefilter.html>`_
   lesson from `The Unix Shell
   <https://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/>`_


Let's work through that lesson together...


Summary
=======

We learned the following commands:

* ``wc`` : count the number of lines, words, and characters in a file

* ``cat`` : print the contents of a file to the terminal

* ``less`` : a *pager* that outputs the contents of a file one screen-full at a time

* ``sort`` : sort the input data

* ``head`` : output the first 10 (or specified number of) lines of a file

* ``tail`` : output the last 10 (or specified number of) lines of a file

We also learned:

* ``>`` redirect the output to a file

* ``>>`` append the output to a file

* ``|`` pass the output of one command to the input of the next