A filter program is classically a UNIX program that is designed to be used as part of a pipeline of two or more UNIX utilities. Generally a filter program will read its standard input and write to its standard output and do little else. Conventionally a filter program distinguishes itself by being fairly simple and performing essentially one operation, usually some sort of simple transformation of its input data.
The classic filter would be grep; here's an example:
cut -d : -f 1This finds all registered users that have "foo" as part of their username.
Common UNIX filter programs are: cat, cut, grep, head, sort, uniq and tail. Programs like awk and sed can be used to build quite complex filters because they are fully programmable.
A more complete list of UNIX filter programs:
