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P4 CLI Documentation | 2026.1

# 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.

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