Ubuntu Wireless question: was Re: Ubuntu Studio question

[Brian McKee]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Michael Falkenburg
<mandcfalk at verizon.net> wrote:
> Sorry about the delay...like I said, it's a 3rd-shift dilemma.
>
> Here is the lspci -v info:
> (oh yeah, before I forget, where in the world does the vertical line
> come from - the one you had before "grep Ethernet" - and what does it mean?

The vertical line is called a pipe |

It's like a joiner between two commands - pass the output of this into
the input of that  - connecting them like a 'pipe'

On a typical US 104 key keyboard it's usually located above the Enter
key with the backslash \

It's one of the pillars of Unix.   For instance

ls -ahl   will list in long format all the files in the current directory
grep Fred  will look for a line with 'Fred' in it from the information
you pass into grep

Here's an example

==> ls -ahl
total 0
drwxr-xr-x    5 bmckee  bmckee  170B Sep 23 14:30 .
drwxr-xr-x   96 bmckee  bmckee    3K Sep 23 14:30 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 bmckee  bmckee    0B Sep 23 14:31 fred.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 bmckee  bmckee    0B Sep 23 14:30 somethingelse.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 bmckee  bmckee    0B Sep 23 14:30 test.txt

==> ls -ahl | grep test
-rw-r--r--    1 bmckee  bmckee    0B Sep 23 14:30 test.txt

See how 'piping' the output of `ls` into `grep` let us find just what we wanted?

In his original suggestion to you, piping lspci thru grep to find
Ethernet would have resulted in zero output.  It might have been a bit
confusing, but it would have saved a lot of innocent bits that got
shoved through my email for no good reason :-)


HTH

Brian