Using the Unix Chainsaw: Named Pipes and Process Substitution by Vince Buffalo.
From the post:
It’s hard not to fall in love with Unix as a bioinformatician. In a past post I mentioned how Unix pipes are an extremely elegant way to interface bioinformatics programs (and do inter-process communication in general). In exploring other ways of interfacing programs in Unix, I’ve discovered two great but overlooked ways of interfacing programs: the named pipe and process substitution.
Why We Love Unix and Pipes
A few weeks ago I stumbled across a great talk by Gary Bernhardt entitled The Unix Chainsaw. Bernhardt’s “chainsaw” analogy is great: people sometimes fear doing work in Unix because it’s a powerful tool, and it’s easy to screw up with powerful tools. I think in the process of grokking Unix it’s not uncommon to ask “is this clever and elegant? or completely fucking stupid?”. This is normal, especially if you come from a language like Lisp or Python (or even C really). Unix is a get-shit-done system. I’ve used a chainsaw, and you’re simultaneously amazed at (1) how easily it slices through a tree, and (2) that you’re dumb enough to use this thing three feet away from your vital organs. This is Unix.
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“The Unix Chainsaw.” Definitely a title for a drama about a group of shell hackers that uncover fraud and waste in large government projects. 😉
If you are not already a power user on *nix, this could be a step in that direction.