When did the windows command line get the pipe (|)? [closed]

I freely admit I have very little experience with the Windows cli but I seem to recall that DOS had no pipe (or redirect for that matter, but I may well be wrong, it's been a while).

I have seen some answers on this site that use the Unix pipe (|) character to pass information from one command to another. Is this something the Windows cli has added relatively recently? Is it a part of the normal Windows shell? Was it always there and I just did not know it? Did DOS have it?

In summary, can someone give me a short history of piping in the windows command line?

2 Answers

It has been there since IBM's PC DOS 2, from what this page says

The UNIX concepts implemented in DOS 2.0 were:

Hierarchical directories
Redirection (pipes)
Background execution (daemons)

DOS / Windows uses the | pipe, >, >>, <, and << for redirection.

Powershell also uses the pipe heavily, where something like:

get-Something "C:\Program Files" | $_.Attribute | Out-File H:\MyInfo.txt

I know the pipe and redirection was available since DOS 5. See this book.

Found a reference to piping and redirection in DOS 2.0 here.

So its definitely been around for a while...