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plumbing n.
[Unix] Term used for [shell] code, so called because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp. used in the construction `hairy plumbing' (see [hairy]). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out of sort(1), comm(1), and tr(1) with a little plumbing." See also [tee].
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