Shell:Why do I need spaces when using pipe symbol?

Asked Sep 17 '19 at 13:08

Active Sep 17 '19 at 13:08

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As stated in this question (and especially in John1024's answer, | is a metacharacter and hence, does not need spaces around it.

It makes me really confused because when I try to pipe a command I get an error "<cmd>: command not found". If I delete the space after the pipe symbol, the command runs perfectly. Even stranger: after successfully piping a command, I can run the same command with a space after the pipe symbol.

For instance :

man bash | grep foo will return -bash: grep: command not found
man bash |grep foo will output 3 lines containing 'foo'
man bash | grep foo will now run and output the 3 same lines

I'd be really grateful if anyone could explain this behavior

asked Sep 17 '19 at 13:08

Sumak

My bad :x. Thanks for the link though ! – Sumak Sep 17 '19 at 13:12
1

No worries, finding that answer involved knowing it, really. It’s not an obvious problem, your question is perfectly justified. – Stephen Kitt Sep 17 '19 at 13:16

Shell:Why do I need spaces when using pipe symbol?

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