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In computer programming, a filter is a program or section of code that is designed to examine each input or output request for certain qualifying criteria and then process or forward it accordingly. This term was used in Unix systems and is now used in other operating systems. A filter is "pass-through" code that takes input data, makes some specific decision about it and possible transformation of it, and passes it on to another program in a kind of pipeline. Usually, a filter does no input/output operation on its own. Filters are sometimes used to remove or insert headers or control characters in data.