What is the difference between command grouping and pipelining?

Question

I couldn't understand the difference between command grouping and pipelining

Command grouping as in what ? You mean foo ; bar or { foo; bar;} ? Can you provide specific commands that you're confused about ? — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Jan 22 '19 at 06:21
What is the difference between ( foo ; bar ), { foo ; bar ; } and foo | bar — karthik menon, Jan 22 '19 at 07:02
Possible duplicate of When to use () vs. {} in bash? and Difference between | and || — Olorin, Jan 22 '19 at 07:32

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 22 '19 at 07:26

The differences between these are:

( foo; bar; )

It will execute the commands in a subshell, so if you made any changes in the subshell they will not appear outside the subshell. Like

i=2; ( ((i++)); echo $i ); echo $i

You will get output:

3
2

If you do the same thing in { } then it will be executed in the same environment, so the changes will matter. Like

i=2; { ((i++)); echo $i; }; echo $i

will give:

3
3

Now let's come to pipelining, pipelining is used to take input and give output to some commands.So the command:

a | b

the output of command a will be given as an input to command b.

echo "hi" | cat

will give you output hi. So output of echo "hi" i.e. hi will be input of cat command.

1 Answers1