Yes, using pipes is the right way. I am doing that quite frequently, for example sorting a huge file with the shell sort command and redirecting the sorted output to a Perl program through a pipe. At the beginning, sort is not writing anything out (it has to process at least in part the whole file before it can start printing out anything); during that phase, the Perl program is just sitting idle, waiting for data to start to come. At a later point, the sort command might be spitting out data lines faster than the Perl program would be able process them, but it is OK because the pipe pauses the sort to enable the Perl program to consume the data at its own speed.