Pipelines are supported in most popular operating systems, from Unix and DOS onwards, and are created using the "|" character in many shells.
Pipelines are an important part of many traditional Unix applications and support for them is well integrated into most Unix-like operating systems.
Many traditional Unix programs are designed as filters to work with pipes.
On Microsoft Windows, reads and writes to anonymous pipes are always blocking.
Likewise, a write to a full pipe will cause the calling thread to wait until space becomes available to store the data being written.