Shell Pipelines for Data Processing

Introduction

In this lab, you will learn how to use pipelines in shell programming. Pipelines, often called pipes, allow you to chain commands together and connect the output of one command to the input of the next. This is useful when you need to process complex or lengthy input.

Skills Graph

Accessing CPU Information

To begin, we will access CPU information from the /proc/cpuinfo file. This file contains detailed information about the processors in your system. You can use the cat command to display the contents of the file.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Filtering CPU Information

Next, we will filter the CPU information to determine the number of processors in the system. Each processor entry in the /proc/cpuinfo file contains a line starting with processor: followed by a unique number. We can use the grep command to search for this pattern and retrieve the relevant lines.

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor

Counting the Processors

Now that we have the processor entries, we can use the wc command with the -l option to count the number of lines in the output. Each line represents a processor, so the line count will give us the total number of processors.

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l

Summary

In this lab, you learned how to use pipelines in shell programming to chain commands and process complex inputs. You used the cat, grep, and wc commands to access CPU information, filter relevant lines, and count the number of processors. Pipelines are a powerful tool for efficient data processing in shell scripts.