I just wrote a command chain (something unix admins do often) that looks like this:
- gzcat threeGB-file.gz \
- | grep ‘match this’ \
- | grep -Ev ‘but not this’ \
- | cut -f1 -d’ ‘ \
- | uniq \
- | /usr/local/bin/idn -u \
- | tr ‘[:upper:]’ ‘[:lower:]’ \
- > infile.fifo &
That command pipeline decompresses a file, filters out the metadata, weeds out dupes, converts punycode IDN names to UTF-8, converts caps to lower case, and makes the data available as a file.
While sucking the contents of that file into a MySQL table, I noticed that each of the commands in the pipeline was running on a separate CPU core. While it’s not the same as Grand Central Dispatch, it’s fun to see just how well the Unix Philosophy had weathered the decades.