10 Useful Chaining Operators in Linux with Practical Examples

Chaining of Linux commands means, combining several commands and make them execute based upon the behaviour of operator used in between them. Chaining of commands in Linux, is something like you are writing short shell scripts at the shell itself, and executing them from the terminal directly. Chaining makes it possible to automate the process. Moreover, an unattended machine can function in a much systematic way with the help of chaining operators.

10 Chaining Operators in Linux

Read Also: How to Use Awk and Regular Expressions to Filter Text in Files

This Article aims at throwing light on frequently used command­-chaining operators, with short descriptions and corresponding examples which surely will increase your productivity and lets you write short and meaningful codes beside reducing system load, at times.

1. Ampersand Operator (&)

The function of ‘&‘ is to make the command run in background. Just type the command followed with a white space and ‘&‘. You can execute more than one command in the background, in a single go.

Run one command in the background:

tecmint@localhost:~$ ping ­c5 www.tecmint.com &

Run two command in background, simultaneously:

root@localhost:/home/tecmint# apt-get update & apt-get upgrade &

2. semi-colon Operator (;)

The semi-colon operator makes it possible to run, several commands in a single go and the execution of command occurs sequentially.

root@localhost:/home/tecmint# apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade ; mkdir test

The above command combination will first execute update instruction, then upgrade instruction and finally will create a ‘test‘ directory under the current working directory.

      ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

                                                    ► Read more: http://adf.ly/1nBUvo

      ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬