Stream (computing)In computer science, a stream is a sequence of data elements made available over time. A stream can be thought of as items on a conveyor belt being processed one at a time rather than in large batches. Streams are processed differently from batch data – normal functions cannot operate on streams as a whole, as they have potentially unlimited data, and formally, streams are codata (potentially unlimited), not data (which is finite).
Redirection (computing)In computing, redirection is a form of interprocess communication, and is a function common to most command-line interpreters, including the various Unix shells that can redirect standard streams to user-specified locations. In Unix-like operating systems, programs do redirection with the system call, or its less-flexible but higher-level stdio analogues, and . Redirection is usually implemented by placing certain characters between commands. Typically, the syntax of these characters is as follows, using < to redirect input, and > to redirect output.
Bash (Unix shell)Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. Bash was one of the first programs Linus Torvalds ported to Linux, alongside GCC. A version is also available for Windows 10 and Windows 11 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It is also the default user shell in Solaris 11. Bash was also the default shell in versions of Apple macOS from 10.
COMMAND.COMCOMMAND.COM is the default command-line interpreter for MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. In the case of DOS, it is the default user interface as well. It has an additional role as the usual first program run after boot (init process), hence being responsible for setting up the system by running the AUTOEXEC.BAT configuration file, and being the ancestor of all processes. COMMAND.COM's successor on OS/2 and Windows NT systems is cmd.exe, although COMMAND.
Vala (programming language)Vala is an object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system. Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes notable features such as anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements. Its developers, Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini, wanted to bring these features to the plain C runtime with little overhead and no special runtime support by targeting the GObject object system.
EmacsEmacs ˈiːmæks, originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.1, released July 2023.
Computer terminalA computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and predated the use of a computer screen by decades. Early terminals were inexpensive devices but very slow compared to punched cards or paper tape for input, yet as the technology improved and video displays were introduced, terminals pushed these older forms of interaction from the industry.
Command substitutionIn computing, command substitution is a facility that allows a command to be run and its output to be pasted back on the command line as arguments to another command. Command substitution first appeared in the Bourne shell, introduced with Version 7 Unix in 1979, and has remained a characteristic of all later Unix shells. The feature has since been adopted in other programming languages as well, including Perl, PHP, Ruby and Microsoft's Powershell under Windows. It also appears in Microsoft's CMD.
