On Thu, Dec 5, 2024 at 8:20 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

Unix pipelines, on the other hand, tend to be used in a manner that is
strictly linear, without the fan-out and fan-in capabilities described
by Morrison. Of course, nothing prevents one from building a
Morrison-style "network" from Unix processes and pipes, though it's
hard to see how that would work without something like `select`, which
didn't yet exist in 1978. Regardless, Unix still doesn't expose a
particularly convenient syntax for expressing these sorts of
constructions at the shell.


Rick Troth has recently published xfl, which is pretty much CMS Pipelines for Unix.

https://github.com/trothtech/xfl

He's got a slide deck on it at http://www.casita.net/pub/xfl/pervasive-vmws-2024.pdf .

There are a lot of really cool things you can do with fanin/fanout.

Adam