What does '|' mean in file /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern?

Question

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
|/usr/share/apport/apport %p %s %c %d %P

What does '|' mean in file /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern?

Drews

Possible duplicate of What is a simple explanation for how pipes work in BASH? – Luetic

It means (take the stdout from this process) | (and tie it to stdin of this one) – Knick

@ben this isn’t a question about bash, it’s about a file format. It happens to be that the format adopts a notation used also in bash, but that doesn’t make the question a dupe. – Koziarz

Answer 1

In the linux kernel documentation /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt.

[/proc/sys/kernel/]core_pattern is used to specify a core dumpfile pattern name.

• If the first character of the pattern is a '|', the kernel will treat the rest of the pattern as a command to run. The core dump will be written to the standard input of that program instead of to a file.

Palmieri