Rubenerd

Today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t comes from Klara Systems:

Redirection in #FreeBSD allows you to save the output from a command to a file or pass it on as the input for another command.

Basic forms of redirection with | for pipes and < and > for I/O of files date back to very early UNIX where the concept was first pioneered.

Pipes and redirection were one of those lightbulb moments I had with *nix, albeit on Red Hat Linux at the time. Years later I accidentally realised I could even use them on DOS, albeit in a more limited capacity.

We take a lot of tooling for granted on these systems, because their use has become second nature. It’s a testament to those forward-thinking engineers.

(I’m sure some shortsighted Linux developer is already looking to extend systemd with redirectd(1) that only accepts JSON or something).