On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 12:18:58PM -0800, Olwe Bottorff wrote: > If I use pipes at the command line in a shell > > >ls | grep myfile > > is the underlying c code in ls and grep using named > pipes, fifo, or something much more mysterious? fifo, i.e. an un-named pipe. If you run it with strace like so: strace -f /bin/sh -c 'ls | grep myfile' 2>&1 | less you should see that the shell calls pipe() and dups it to stdin and stdout before starting ls and grep. Nate