plumbing

Pipes which are built into our infrastructure which carry water, waste, fuel and wiring. Pipes are installed and maintained by a plumber who usually overcharges you for his mindless, and often dirty work.

A cute bit of trivia about plumbing is that the word derives from plumbum, the Latin word for lead, since pipes used to be made out of lead. (There's a theory that all those lead pipes eventually led to so much lead poisoning that it contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.)

plumbing n.

[Unix] Term used for shell code, so called because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp. used in the construction `hairy plumbing' (see hairy). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out of sort(1), comm(1), and tr(1) with a little plumbing." See also tee.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

Plumb"ing (?), n.

1.

The art of casting and working in lead, and applying it to building purposes; especially, the business of furnishing, fitting, and repairing pipes for conducting water, sewage, etc.

Gwilt.

2.

The lead or iron pipes, and other apparatus, used in conveying water, sewage, etc., in a building.

© Webster 1913.