Pipelines in GUIs
Graphical environments such as RISC OS and ROX Desktop also make use of pipelines. Rather than providing a save dialog box containing a file manager to let the user specify where a program should write data, RISC OS and ROX provide a save dialog box containing an icon (and a field to specify the name). The destination is specified by dragging and dropping the icon. The user can drop the icon anywhere an already-saved file could be dropped, including onto icons of other programs. If the icon is dropped onto a program's icon, it's loaded and the contents that would otherwise have been saved are passed in on the new program's standard input stream.
For instance, a user browsing the world-wide web might come across a .gz compressed image which they want to edit and re-upload. Using GUI pipelines, they could drag the link to their de-archiving program, drag the icon representing the extracted contents to their image editor, edit it, open the save as dialog, and drag its icon to their uploading software.
Conceptually, this method could be used with a conventional save dialog box, but this would require the user's programs to have an obvious and easily accessible location in the filesystem that can be navigated to. In practice, this is often not the case, so GUI pipelines are rare.
Read more about this topic: Pipeline (software)