Difference between redirection and pipe
Pipe is used to pass output to another program or utility.
Redirect is used to pass output to either a file or stream.
Example: thing1 > thing2 vs thing1 | thing2
thing1 > thing2
1 Your shell will run the program named thing1 2 Everything that thing1 outputs will be placed in a file called thing2. (Note - if thing2 exists, it will be overwritten)
If you want to pass the output from program thing1 to a program called thing2, you could do the following:
thing1 > temp_file && thing2 < temp_file
which would
1 run program named thing1 2 save the output into a file named temp_file 3 run program named thing2, pretending that the person at the keyboard typed the contents of temp_file as the input.