On Thu, 9 Sep 2010 13:24:16 -0400 Matt Neimeyer <m...@neimeyer.org> wrote:
> My generic question is: When I'm using a pipe line series of commands > do I use up more/less space than doing things in sequence? > > For example, I have a development Gentoo VM that has a hard drive that > is too small... I wanted to move a database off of that onto another > machine but when I tried the following I filled my partition and 'evil > things' happened... > > mysqldump blah... > gzip blah... > > In this specific case I added another virtual drive, mounted that and > went on with life but I'm curious if I could have gotten away with the > pipe line instead. Will doing something like this still use "twice" > the space? > > mysqldump | gzip > file.sql.gz > > OR going back to my generic question if I pipe line like "type | sort > | unique > output" does that only use 1x or 3x the disk space? > > Thanks in advance! > > Matt > > P.S. If the answer is "it depends" how do know what it depends on? Pipes live in memory and do not take any disk space. Doing the same operations one after another instead of using pipes instead usually needs temporary file, which *do* take disk space.
