Pipelines
Details
| Size: | 5.58 MB |
| Last Update: | 2008-01-20 10:01:15 |
| Version: | 1.3 |
| OS Support: | Windows NT/XP |
| License/Program Type: | GPL |
| Publisher: | TenFiftyTwo |
| Price: | $0.00 |
Description:
Pipelines description
Modify the contents of a text file or files, quickly and
easily
Pipelines is a utility that allows you to change the contents of a
text file or files, quickly and easily. You can specify that only
certain sections of a file are to be changed; you can confine those
changes to a column, word or field range, translate words and
phrases, discard or insert new lines of text. You can perform a
whole range of operations on a file or files, using only a simple
set of commands.
Pipelines build’s on the concept of directing the output
of one process to the input of another; commonly known as
pipelining.
However, Pipelines takes an extra step; allowing you to build
multi-stream pipelines, where the topology is no longer horizontal
and linear, but two-dimensional; where the records travel up and
down the pipeline chain through intersecting joints which control
the flow of data.
With standard linear pipelines the data flows through each
filter or stage, passing into the next and so on until it reaches a
sink. Multi-stream pipelines on the other hand allow you to select
and operate on specific sets of records; routing unselected records
through a joint into and out of other sections of the pipeline.
This allows you to join multiple pipelines together in
configurations that address a whole range of transformation
problems.
Pipelines comprises 42 input, output, selection and
transformation stages which cover a broad range of manipulation
functions; splitting records, stripping characters, joining
records, collating and sorting and more.
On the whole, similar operations are performed by a single
stage; which means that you do not have to remember the names of an
unnecessarily lengthy list of stages. For example; stripping
characters from a record, Pipelines provides a single stage called
STRIP which removes characters from the beginning and/or the end of
a record.
The Pipelines syntax is very simple; it does not employ lists
of terse /switches, but rather, an English-like syntax which
is straight forward to read.
With Pipelines, the pipeline can be specified on the system
command-line, in a batch file or in a Pipelines file, ext (.PPL).
You design the pipeline in your favourite editor and save it; to
execute the pipeline you simply double click the file icon and
Pipelines will launch it.
You can specify pipelines which accept arguments which
substitute stage operands and even stage names and coupled with the
capability to connect pipelines together this allows you build a
range of utility pipelines that can be called upon whenever you
need them.
You may find Pipelines of use in many cases where you might
otherwise have to write a program to solve the problem and it may
well save you some time and effort that could be better spent on
other tasks.
Here are some key features of
"Pipelines":
· Multiple Pipelines instances may execute
concurrently.
· Pipelines dispatches the stages in the order in which
they appear in the pipeline, however; any stage may be the first to
begin processing records.
· The relative order of the records flowing through a
pipeline can be predicted; as long as the stage path only comprises
stages’ that do not delay the records.
· Unless the pipeline comprises a stage or stages’
that accumulate records; for example the SORT stage, and, that the
input records are not excessively long, Pipelines requires only a
small amount of memory to process input files of any size; as only
a handful of records will be in the pipeline at any one time.
· Pipelines is not pre-emptive. When a stage reports an
initialisation or runtime error; Pipelines begins terminating the
pipeline by instructing all active stages to quiesce. When all
active stages in the pipeline chain have responded to the quiesce
command and have terminated; Pipelines terminates.
· Pipelines does not verify that a pipeline is
semantically correct, only that it is syntactically correct. This
means that you may construct a pipeline that does not execute in
the way that you expect it to. It may produce output records in a
format or an order that you did not intend or it may not produce
any output records at all. In view of this; when developing a
pipeline that replaces the contents of a disk file, it is
particularly prudent to test the pipeline against a copy of that
file. Pipelines does not issue "are you sure?" messages!
· Pipelines does not work with records containing MBCS
or UNCODE data, only the single-byte ASCII character set is
supported. As a consequence, you should ensure that only ASCII type
input files are selected for modification. Pipelines cannot
determine the format of an input file; it simply executes the
pipeline that you specify.
· Pipelines comprises a stall detection mechanism that
determines when a pipeline is stalled; A stall occurs when
Pipelines determines that every stage is either waiting to read a
record or write a record. That is, there is no stage that is
currently processing a record; all stages are either read-pending
or write-pending. Pipelines writes the current status of each stage
in the pipeline to a dump-file which can be inspected to determine
the combination of stream connections that caused the stall.
· When a stage does not specifically limit the number of
input and/or output streams, the stage may process up to 4096 input
streams and the unsigned integer value MAX_INT output streams.
· The pipeline is not interpreted, Pipelines performs a
single-pass parse of the pipeline; allocating the resources
required by each stage and then it begins dispatching them.
· A pipeline can be specified as an element in a system
command-line or a batch-file pipeline, for example; the following
pipeline sorts its input data on three key fields (1-20, 30-40 and
80-100); 30-40 is the sub-sort field of 1-20 and 80-100 is the
sub-sort field of 30-40.
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