Working with Unix pipes

Unix pipes are useful when passing the output of one program to the input of another. For example, take a look at this:

$ echo "test case" | wc -l
   1

In a Go application, the left-hand side of the pipe can be read in using os.Stdin and acts like a file descriptor. To demonstrate this, this recipe will take an input on the left-hand side of a pipe and return a list of words and their number of occurrences. These words will be tokenized on white space.

Getting ready

Refer to the Getting ready section's steps in the Using command-line flags recipe.

How to do it...

These steps cover writing and running your application:

1. From your terminal/console application, create a new directory called chapter2/pipes and navigate to that directory.
2. Copy tests from https://github.com/agtorre/go-cookbook/tree/master/chapter2/pipes, or use this as an exercise to write some of your own code!

3. Create a file called pipes.go with the following contents:

        package main

        import (
    ...