[Tutor] Unix philosophy

[Kalle Svensson]

Hi!

[Guillermo Fernandez Castellanos]
> I was having a look at the UNIX philosophy and I readed that:
> "Make every program a filter
> This makes it easy to build a set of filter components into ``one
> big filter.'' Programs can communicate by explicitly reading and
> writing files; that is / much / more complex to manage, and requires
> a lot of disk I/O for interim output. A set of filters may pass data
> straight from memory buffer to memory buffer, avoiding disk
> altogether."
> 
> I was wondering how I could be able to make my python programs work
> in a filter mode?

Basically, what you have to do is read input from stdin and write
output to stdout.  That makes it possible to use it as a filter in a
pipeline like

  grep something < file | python myprog.py | lp

or whatever.  The "|" signs here connect the first program's stdout to
the second program's stdin.

Peace,
  Kalle
-- 
Kalle Svensson, http://www.juckapan.org/~kalle/
Student, root and saint in the Church of Emacs.