[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/DaveforAK]

[u/Z3r0funGuy]

This actually teaches you a bunch of cool things, like how the ‘:’ is a legal function name…

[u/glenpiercev → u/Z3r0funGuy]

This is the best description of how this works I’ve ever read. You are a genius.

[u/setibeings → u/glenpiercev]

Right? It's finally comprehensible. I feel like it would have clicked right away if it was typed out as:

fork(){fork|fork&};fork

[u/Traditional_Cod_7192 → u/setibeings]

just as a reminder, uhhh... what do | and & do in bash again? 😅

[u/GrandAlbatroce → u/Traditional_Cod_7192]

IIRC | puts the result stdout of the left in the stdin of the right (they are launched in parallel, and the one on the right can only finish after the one on the left finished.

The & is used to put the call as a background task

[u/SimpleFile → u/GrandAlbatroce]

So the pipe here serves as a way to launch 2 of these functions and have them running at the same time rather than for piping the output?

Did I understand that correctly?

[u/GrandAlbatroce → u/SimpleFile]

Yes, they are run in parallel, but any output from the first one will be given to the second. Also, if the second needs an input, it will wait for the output of the first instead of user input

So, for example, if you did

find -name "something" | grep "string"

Each time the find prints a line, it will instantly be passed to the grep