What is this yellow thing with a pipe?
It is a named-pipe - one of the 7 types of file in Unix. The p
in prw--w--w-
confirms it is a named-pipe.
You can write to the pipe from one side and read the data from the other side:
$ mkfifo mypipe
$ cat mypipe
In another terminal
$ cat > mypipe
Hello from the other side
What's up?
Whatever you type in here will appear in the other terminal.
l
is an alias to ls -CF
and ll
is alias to ls -alFh
.
According to the man page
-F, --classify
append indicator (one of */=>@|) to entries
So for a named-pipe |
is appended to the filename.
You can identify any 'file' on a linux system by using the command file, followed by the file name.
file "trigger"
Would tell you it's a named pipe.