> Any given combination of pipe tools, there's a kind of random chance they'll actually work in the end or not.
While this may be your experience, the mechanism of FIFO pipes in Unix (which is filehandles and buffers, basically), is an old one that is both elegant and robust; it doesn't "randomly" fail due to unreliability of the core algorithm or components. In 20 years, I never had an init script or bash command fail due to the pipe(3) call itself being unreliable.
If you misunderstand detailed behavior of the commands you are stitching together--or details of how you're transiting the network in case of an ssh remote command--then yes, things may go wrong. Especially if you are creating Hail Mary one-liners, which become unwieldy.
If got to agree. I can’t recall a pipe ever failing due to unreliability.
One issue I did used to have (before I discovered ‘-o pipefail’[1]) was the annoyance that if an earlier command in a pipeline failed, all the other commands in the pipeline still ran albeit with no data or garbage data being piped to them.
While this may be your experience, the mechanism of FIFO pipes in Unix (which is filehandles and buffers, basically), is an old one that is both elegant and robust; it doesn't "randomly" fail due to unreliability of the core algorithm or components. In 20 years, I never had an init script or bash command fail due to the pipe(3) call itself being unreliable.
If you misunderstand detailed behavior of the commands you are stitching together--or details of how you're transiting the network in case of an ssh remote command--then yes, things may go wrong. Especially if you are creating Hail Mary one-liners, which become unwieldy.