VDict mobile



(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 temporary 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 operatingsystems such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities.
The tee utility is specifically designed for plumbing.
(1995-02-23)