
CMS Pipelines - dedalus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS_Pipelines
======
dedalus
1\. Unix pipes are 1 dimensional

grep ”^#” dat1 | foobar > dat2

whereas the key thing about this idea is that real pipes can be
multidimensional

grep ”^#” dat1 | foobar

| |

| | snafu | stitch > dat2

2\. This system treats ">" as a program in itself and verifies a "program
descriptor" before it trashes the next one in the pipe

3\. Unix pipes give you the error code of the first stopped component in the
pipeline whereas in this model you can hook up instrumentation/statistics to
any stage of the pipe

~~~
ephemeris
unix pipes are multidimensional via fifo. I have done like follows when I want
a poor mans "GROUP BY"

mkfifo p1 cat data | tee p1 | awk '{print $5}' | sort | uniq -c | join -1 5 -2
1 -o 1.1,2,2.1,1.2,2.2,2.3 - p1

------
ephemeris
I have dealt with cms pipelines. It is a lot like everything ibm vs unix,
over-specified, verbose and awkward. The unix pipeline is designed around
making the normal case easy and straight forward. Remember unix is a game.

------
geon
On Debian, you can use pipexec to create and manage a directed graph of
processes and pipes.

[https://github.com/flonatel/pipexec](https://github.com/flonatel/pipexec)

------
codezero
TIL Rexx wasn't something OS/2 specific :)

~~~
SwellJoe
My only exposure to Rexx was when it (ARexx) started shipping with AmigaOS, as
the preferred scripting language. It was very nice for the time, and I still
kinda pine for a truly universal scripting language that has that much interop
with the OS and a large number of applications for the system. It kinda
provided a means to use desktop GUI apps in a manner similar to CLI programs
with pipes.

------
dang
We took "Far better than Unix Pipes with multistream+multilevel dispatch" out
of the title. That's editorializing, which is not allowed in HN titles.

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you're
welcome to do so by posting a comment about that to the thread. Then your
opinion is on the same level as everyone else's.

~~~
dedalus
Got it. Thank You. I didnt know about this policy but basically trying to
answer the question as to why one should read it/look at it. I was trying to
stave off the question that this is for 'mainframe' computing and that it is
dated etc

~~~
dang
By all means please make the case in the thread about why this is interesting.
And thanks for posting so many high-quality stories to Hacker News! Historical
material, like this one, is particularly welcome.

