50th Anniversary Of '|' Apparently today is the 50th anniversary of using '|' for connecting shell pipelines. It was introduced in v4 of the Thompson shell, whose manpage is dated 1973-04-18 [1]. Previously the syntax for 'a | b' was `a >b>` [2]. [1]: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v4/ [2]: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v3/ |
I wonder if ^ was deprecated because of the likelihood it'd be commonly used at the start of a regexp for grep, but | used to provide alternatives in a regexp was probably much less frequently used and so having to quote is was less of a problem than for ^.
Also interesting that the v3 format had both input and output filters, which is just semantic repositioning of the commands.
So if you prompt, you can just "^ | table" to say "Now use the above and show me in a table." ; or just " ^ table " should suffice, ideally.
!! | some_command
Should theoretically work as youre describing in bash today!
I'm not sure if it's true, but I've heard that the inspiration for Unix pipes came from APL.