Piping commands together in unix

Question

How do I pipe the output of one command to another in unix? For example, If I want to pipe the output of sort to tail, how would I do that?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The | character is used to pipe the stdout of one program to the stdin of another.

sort file.txt | tail

This will work in any POSIX compliant shell.

Answer 2

Try doing this :

sort file.txt | tail

See http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html and search 2.9.2 Pipelines paragraph