Streaming across Node processes

Streams are about facilitating efficient, low memory data transfer, and processing; not just to and from the filesystem, but also to other processes and across network sockets.

In this recipe, we're going to write some simple command-line stream apps, then mix and match them with the common stream processing apps written in other languages.

Getting ready

Let's create two files: text_stream.js and uppercaser.js. Both of these need to be executable files as we're going to run them directly as command-line apps:

touch text_stream.js && chmod +x text_stream.js
touch uppercaser.js && chmod + x uppercaser.js

How to do it…

Let's start by making a readable stream that randomly pushes lowercase alphabetical letters to its reader and pipes the stream to process.stdout. In text_stream.js, we will write:

#!/usr/bin/env node 

var stream = require('stream'); 
var util = require('util'); 
var textStream; 

function TextStream() { 
    stream.Readable.call(this...