Learning the grep command and came across this. How does it work combined with tail?

Question

What would grep '&' input.txt | tail -4 give me? I am new to this and cannot figure out what happens using grep and tail together.

Unless this is part of a script, the question isn't really on-topic and should probably be asked at https://unix.stackexchange.com/ instead. — Lundin, Feb 03 '21 at 15:06
Pipe doesn't change the commands. Each does what they do separately. All it does is send the output of grep as the input to tail. — stark, Feb 03 '21 at 15:07

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 03 '21 at 15:11

tail -4 when executed with a file would normally print the last four lines of the file

With:

grep '&' input.txt | tail -4

The tail command is being executed on the output of the grep command and so will print the last 4 lines of the output of grep.

If for example there are 50 occurrences of "&" in input.txt, only the last 4 will print.

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