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2. Run a Program With Nix

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The Nix CLI did a few things:

• It used the nixpkgs flake reference to pull in some Nix code and targeted the ponysay flake output (more on this later).
  
• It built the ponysay package and stored the result in the Nix store.
  
• It ran the executable at bin/ponysay from the ponysay package.

In Nix, every program is part of a package. Packages are built using the Nix language. The ponysay package has a single program (also called ponysay) but packages can contain multiple programs as well as man pages, configuration files, and more.

You may have noticed that nix run doesn’t require anything like a nix install command. This makes it handy for use cases like shell scripting or experimenting with in-progress tools.

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