- Appendix A. Welcome to the Command Line
- Starting Up the Terminal
- Moving Around the Filesystem
- Manipulating Files and Folders
- System Information Commands
- Searching and Editing Text Files
- Dealing with Users and Groups
- Getting Help on the Command Line
- Searching for Man Files
- Using Wildcards
- Executing Multiple Commands
- Moving to More Advanced Uses of the Command Line
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Executing Multiple Commands
Often you may want to execute several commands together, either by running one after another or by passing output from one to another.
Running Sequentially
If you need to execute multiple commands in sequence but don't need to pass output between them, there are two options based on whether or not you want the subsequent commands to run only if the previous commands succeed or not. If you want the commands to run one after the other regardless of whether or not preceding commands succeed, place a ; between the commands. For example, if you want to get information about your hardware, you could run lspci ; lsusb, which would output information on your PCI buses and USB devices in sequence.
However, if you need to conditionally run the commands based on whether the previous command has succeeded, insert && between commands. An example of this is building a program from source, which is traditionally done with ./configure, make, and make install. The commands make and make install require that the previous commands have completed successfully, so you would use ./configure && make && make install.
Passing Output
If you need to pass the output of one command so that it goes to the input of the next, after the character used between the commands, you need something called a pipe, which looks like a vertical bar or pipe (|).
To use the pipe, insert the | between each command. For example, using the | in the command ls | less allows you to view the contents of the ls more easily.