Is a pipeline made of simple commands?

Question

From Bash Reference Manual

A pipeline is a sequence of simple commands separated by one of the control operators | or |&.

From POSIX 2013

A pipeline is a sequence of one or more commands separated by the control operator |.

I know that Bash has many extensions to POSIX shells, e.g. |&.

But are the component commands of a pipeline

• simple commands or
• just any commands (simple, pipeline again, list, compound, and function)?

In Bash, the following works

$ for f in $(ls *); do echo $f; done | cat

but the first component command of the pipeline isn't simple but compound.

Answer 1

The manual for Bash 4.4.5 does not contain the word "simple" from the description of what a pipeline is made up of. The "simple command" you're referring to was probably either a typo or an oversight, or possibly a leftover from a long time ago.

It was fixed by the bash maintainer in April 2014, and it currently reads:

A pipeline is a sequence of one or more commands separated by one of the control operators | or |&.

A pipeline can clearly be made up from commands that or not simple commands (for example subshells and for loops, which are compound commands).

Answer 2

Bash manual (man bash) has never included the word simple in the description of a pipeline. Get any of the bash-${version}.tar.gz files from this site, decompress and take a look at the file bash-${version}/doc/bash.1 which is the manual of bash for each version.

What has included the word simple is the bashref file. From the same downloaded and expanded file as above, read bash-${version}/doc/bashref.pdf, which has included the word simple at point 3.2.2 Pipelines up to version 4.3 of the said bashref manual.

3.2.2 Pipelines A pipeline is a sequence of simple commands separated by … ‘|’ or ‘|&’.

That the bashref included such word has never meant that complex commands (as opposed to "simple") were in any way excluded from being used as part of a pipeline (including {…} if…then… while…do… and others).

Such wording is a simple typo and should not be used to extract any conclusion.