Software: piper

about

The Unix shell pipe mechanism is very powerful, but it is hard to write a complex succession of Unix commands without errors on the first attempt. For every kind of programming language there are now powerful IDEs to help you write the programs, only for Unix shell programming and pipes there are none. I am sure there are ways to improve on the way we work with pipes and make them easier to work with. Here is a small idea towards that goal.

When writing a pipe I will often piece it together command for command adding a "|less" at the end on each step checking the output. Piper makes this easier by always showing me the output of every step in the pipe in several tabs. Commands in the middle of the pipe can be changed and the display will be recomputed.

status

A proof-of-concept implementation of piper written in Perl using Perl/TK is available. This is very simplistic and probably not useable in real life.

download

Download Perl code here: piper. You will need the Tk module.

screen shot

This is a screen shot of piper in action. It was started as piper /etc/services to read the /etc/services file and run the pipe:

  grep -v '^#' | sed -e 's/[ \t].*//' | uniq

future