[imron]

> like pipes that are essentially text-only

Pipes work fine with binary data, you just need to be piping to a tool that works with binary data rather than text e.g.

cat <somebinaryfile> | openssl base64

[twic]

The trouble with that example is that it could more simply be written:

openssl base64 <somebinaryfile

On the plus side, you do get a prize for suggesting it [1]

Something involving bulk binary data moving over a pipe which isn't an indirect redirection would be:

gzip somefile | ssh user@host "gunzip >somefile"

Although, again, there's a perfectly good -c flag to SSH that would do the same thing.

Probably the most common example of tool-to-tool binary communication over pipes is:

find -print0 | xargs -0

[1] http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html

[imron]

> On the plus side, you do get a prize for suggesting it

Good catch! I actually use another command that generates binary output that I pipe to OpenSSL to convert to base64 but rather than type out the full command I thought 'what's the easiest way to get some binary data on stdout' and 'cat binaryfile' was it.