Limitations of chained commands

Aliases can be very powerful. Be mindful of consequences:

• Multi-command chains in an alias are different than shell pipelines. Each sub-command in a shell pipeline is started by the shell as a separate child process, and their input and output is connected using operating system constructs. A multi-command alias, on the other hand, executes in the context of a top-level p4 process, and it executes each sub-command serially, inside the parent p4 process, storing the output in memory. This limits the amount of data that can be piped from one command to the next.
• If one chained command fails, no subsequent commands are executed.