“ |是什么？ bash”在OS X终端上的curl调用末尾

Question

In a tutorial on how to set up virtual box i came across the following line

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

I got curious on what the "| bash" part means, but i can't find it on google and its driving me nuts. Most likely this is a very n00b question, but I would appreciate if someone could give me an explanation.

Answer 1

The | or pipe operator will redirect the output of the previous command ( curl in this case) to bash , ie the shell. bash itself will execute it.

So whatever the website returns will be executed as a shell script.

This is nowadays typical for installers, but you should be aware of the source (website) and content the URL provides, because it may harm your system.

More on the pipeline: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Pipelines.html