PIPE selects programs to run and chains them together in a pipeline to pump data through.

These built-in programs interface to the operating system, and perform many utility functions.

The secondary output of locate (marked by the second occurrence of the a: label) contains the records that did not meet the selection criterion.

These records are translated to upper case (by the xlate stage) and passed to the secondary input stream of faninany (marked by the second occurrence of the i: label).

Records read from the input file pass through either of the two routes of the pipeline topology.

When a pipeline is typed as a CMS command, all stages are written on a single line.

With each release of VM, the CMS Pipelines code was upgraded as well until it was functionally frozen at the 1.1.10 level in VM/ESA 2.3 in 1997.

Both versions are maintained from a single source code base and commonly referred to as CMS/TSO Pipelines.