Query on shells

[Mike Wexler]

> I had oftened wish for an alternative form of pipe syntax that would
> indicate that I wanted a temporary file used instead of an in-core pipe.
> This would be use for scripts dealing with a large amount of data, and
> also on heavily loaded systems.
> 

The whole idea of pipes is that the both ends of the pipe are run in
parellel.  This allows large amounts of data to pass through the
pipes without having a large amount of space to buffer it.  
For instance if I type in the command:
	cat xyz | more
It doesn't not more the whole contents of xyz into memory and then
feed it into more, but it moves the data in 512 byte(system dependent)
chunks into more. More then outputs the stuff to the screen.  Instead
of adding another operator for situations that need large buffers,
the | operator ought to write the stuff out to disk when it runs out
of space(sounds like demand paging to me).


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Mike Wexler(trwrb!pertec!peregrine!mike) | Send all flames to:
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