------------------------------------------------------------- tpipe -- replicate standard output to an additional pipeline version 1.02 6 Mar. 1990 ------------------------------------------------------------- tpipe is a simple utility program that can be used to split a unix pipeline into two pipelines. That is, the output of one pipeline can be replicated and supplied as the input to two other pipelines executing simultaneously. Like tee(1), tpipe transcribes its standard input to its standard output. But where tee(1) writes an additional copy of its input to a file, tpipe writes the additional copy to the input of another pipeline, which is specified as the argument to tpipe. In a typical use, this pipeline will eventually write to a file. The standard output of tpipe is typically piped into another pipeline, whose output (if any) may go to the user's terminal or anywhere at all. I wrote tpipe because I was processing image files (using pbmplus), and I wanted to apply more than one pipeline to the same input file, but the early parts of the pipeline were the same. I did not want to have to execute the early parts multiple times. I did not have enough disk space to write what would have been a huge intermediate file. Frankly, I did not know about teeing to named pipes, but anyway it's nice not to have to bother with them or worry about name conflicts, especially if you have more than one job wanting to do this at the same time... See the manual page for tpipe(1) for information about its use, including an artificial example. This distribution contains four files: Readme (this is it) Makefile (it is trivial) tpipe.1 (the manual page) tpipe.c (the code!) To read the manual page, just `nroff -man tpipe.1'. To compile tpipe, just `make'. Put tpipe.1 in the man1/ directory in your MANPATH or the system man path. -- David B Rosen, Cognitive & Neural Systems rosen@bucasb.bu.edu Center for Adaptive Systems rosen%bucasb@{buacca,bu-it}.bu.edu Boston University {mit-eddie,harvard,uunet}!bu.edu!thalamus!rosen