What is the difference between "Redirection" and "Pipe"?
- by John Threepwood
This question may sound a bit stupid, but I can not really see the difference between redirection and pipes.
Redirection is used to redirect the stdout/stdin/stderr, e.g. ls > log.txt.
Pipes are used to give the output of a command as input to another command, e.g. ls | grep file.txt.
But why are there two operators for the same thing ?
Why not just write ls > grep to pass the output through, isn't this just a kind of redirection also ? What I am missing ?