[TUHS] Re: Pipes (was Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?) (fwd) - cctalk

10 Feb 2026

Hmm ... the list manager apparently stripped the MIME attachment.
Here it is again inline.
--lyndon
------- Forwarded Message
From: Adam Thornton &lt;athornton(a)gmail.com&gt;
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2024 09:55:30 -0700
Message-ID: &lt;CAP2nic0E=0dLT2JaDJv0OCBQUBaqKd6+2hy30hpKjowPVc76BA(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society &lt;tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt;
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Pipes (was Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?)
On Thu, Dec 5, 2024 at 8:20=E2=80=AFAM Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
...

 Unix pipelines, on the other hand, tend to be used in a manner that is
 strictly linear, without the fan-out and fan-in capabilities described
 by Morrison. Of course, nothing prevents one from building a
 Morrison-style "network" from Unix processes and pipes, though it's
 hard to see how that would work without something like `select`, which
 didn't yet exist in 1978. Regardless, Unix still doesn't expose a
 particularly convenient syntax for expressing these sorts of
 constructions at the shell.
 Rick Troth has recently published xfl, which is pretty much CMS Pipelines
for Unix.
https://github.com/trothtech/xfl
He's got a slide deck on it at
http://www.casita.net/pub/xfl/pervasive-vmws-2024.pdf .
There are a lot of really cool things you can do with fanin/fanout.
Adam