Pipex is a 42 project that recreates the behavior of shell pipelines (|). It takes input from a file, processes it through a series of commands, and outputs the result to another file, just like in a Unix shell! In a Unix shell, a pipeline allows the output of one command to be used as input for another.
For example:
cat infile | grep "42" | wc -l > outfile
Pipex takes four or more arguments:
./pipex infile "cmd1" "cmd2" outfile ➡️ < infile cmd1 | cmd2 > outfile
1️⃣ Read input from `infile`
2️⃣ Execute `cmd1`, passing its output through a pipe
3️⃣ Execute `cmd2`, taking input from the first command's output
4️⃣ Write the final output to `outfile`
[ infile ] → [ cmd1 ] → [ pipe ] → [ cmd2 ] → [ outfile ]
- pipe() → Creates a communication channel between processes
- fork() → Spawns child processes to execute commands
- dup2() → Redirects input and output for commands
- execve() → Replaces process with command execution