Pipe waits for the first command to be finished

Since there are 281 open issues, I’m not sure if this is reported before or not

Try a command that takes too long (possibly forever) and produces lots of output, and we want to give the output to another command using pipe, for example:

find / -iname '*.exe' | less

PowerShell waits for the first command to be finished, and then runs the second command and give it the whole output. That is not what Unix pipes have been about for decades! We expect the second command to be executed right after we press enter (try sleep 10 | echo test in Bash), and send any output from first command immediately to the second command.

Tested with PowerShell 6.0.0 on Debian GNU/Linux

[RamblingCookieMonster]

Hi!

@kilasuit, I could be off base, but IIRC commands with a proper process block implementation will stream their output, allowing something akin to @ilius’ example.

I’m guessing there might be some odd behavior if you mix and match output from *nix tools and PowerShell tools, and this would be expected in cases where you have a blocking command (e.g. you need all items to sort them).

Cheers!

[ilius]

I can’t see how this breaks compatibility If a command (like ``Sort-ObjectorSelect-Object`) needs the whole input to process, it can wait for the whole input itself, that’s up to the second command (receiver), that does not prevent the first command (sender) or the Shell to send it’s output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix)