Redirect Input and Output in Linux

Input Output Redirection in Linux

Linux is a powerful operating system that offers a lot of control over how its users interact with their environment. One of the most powerful tools available to the Linux user is Input-Output redirection. With Input-Output redirection, you can redirect data to or from a program or program output to or from a file or other device.

Input redirection simply takes data from an external source such as a file, and sends it to a command or program. This is typically done by using the “<” symbol followed by the source. For example, if you want to read the contents of a file called 'file.txt', you would type: cat < file.txt. This command “cat” stands for “concatenate”, which means it will print the contents of the file to the terminal.

Output redirection is the opposite of input redirection. Instead of the command or program sending its output to the terminal, the output is redirected to a file or other device. This is typically done by using the “>” symbol followed by the destination file. For example, if you wanted to save the output of a command or program to a file called 'output.txt', you would type: command > output.txt.

Input-output redirection allows you to send the output of a program or command to a file, and it also allows you to read the contents of a file into a command or program. This provides a great way to have complex commands and programs that are fed data from different sources. For example, you could use input-output redirection to combine multiple text files into one large file or to transform data from one format to another.

Input-output redirection is a powerful tool that can be used to automate tasks and make complex commands simpler. By combining these two concepts, you can accomplish a wide variety of tasks in the Linux environment.