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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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