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Pipelines in Bash & PowerShell

📌 Introduction

Pipelines allow you to pass the output of one command as input to another, enabling efficient data processing. This cheatsheet provides examples of sorting, filtering, and presenting data using pipelines in Bash and PowerShell.

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🐧 Bash Examples

Sorting

cat file.txt | sort

Sorts the contents of file.txt alphabetically.

Filtering

cat file.txt | grep "pattern"

Filters lines in file.txt that match the specified pattern.

Presenting Data

ls -l | awk '{print $9, $5}'

Displays the file name and size from the ls -l command output.

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🖥️ PowerShell Examples

Sorting

Get-Content file.txt | Sort-Object

Sorts the contents of file.txt alphabetically.

Filtering

Get-Content file.txt | Where-Object { $_ -match "pattern" }

Filters lines in file.txt that match the specified pattern. You can also check for a specific string using findstr (findsrt is a Windows command-line utility):

Get-ChildItem | findstr "pattern"

Presenting Data

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name, Length

Displays the file name and size from the Get-ChildItem command output.

Display as table

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name, Length | Format-Table -AutoSize

displays the file name and size from the Get-ChildItem command output in a table format. you can also use Format-List to display the output in a list format:

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name, Length | Format-List

Display as grid

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name, Length | Out-GridView

This command displays the file name and size from the Get-ChildItem command output in a grid view, allowing for easier data exploration.

Display as HTML

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name, Length | ConvertTo-Html -Fragment | Out-File output.html

This command converts the output of Get-ChildItem to HTML format and saves it to output.html. You can also use ConvertTo-Json to convert the output to JSON format:

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name, Length | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File output.json

This command converts the output of Get-ChildItem to JSON format and saves it to output.json.

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🎯 Conclusion

Pipelines are powerful tools for chaining commands and processing data efficiently. Use these examples as a starting point to build more complex workflows.