PIPING

To pipe (send, channel, direct) the output of one command into another command.

When output from a command that would normally appear on the screen is instead 
used as input to another command, that would normally get its input from the 
keyboard, the output is piped to the input. Piping is controlled by the use of 
the vertical bar (|) character. Some versions of DOS may not support the use 
of piping in BATCH files. Some examples follow. 

If a text file, maybe some sort of document, had 10,000 lines in it, it could 
be displayed on the screen one full screen at a time, with the command

	TYPE BIGFILE.TXT | MORE

If a directory contained 20 entries, to get a listing of the contents of the 
directory in alphabetical order, the command

	DIR | SORT

could be used. If the directory had 120 entries, an alphabetical display one 
full screen at a time could be obtained by the command

	DIR | SORT | MORE
