Pipe Mac

Introduction

Pipe Mac is a command-line tool designed for macOS that enables the pipelining of multiple shell commands to achieve more complex tasks. The tool is similar to the commonly used Unix utility, | or pipe, in that it allows the output of one command to be used as the input of another.

Installation

Pipe Mac can be installed using the popular package manager, Homebrew. To install Pipe Mac using Homebrew, open your terminal and run:

$ brew install pipe-mac

Usage

To use Pipe Mac, you can simply chain multiple commands using the pipe symbol (|). For example, to search for all files in the current directory containing a specific string and then open them using TextEdit, run:

$ grep -l "specific string" * | xargs open -e

In this example, the grep command searches for files containing the specified string, and the output is forwarded using the pipe symbol to the xargs command which opens the files in TextEdit.

Pipe Mac also supports the use of subshells. For example, to list all directories in the current directory, and then list the contents of each directory using the ls command, run:

$ (ls -d */; echo) | xargs -I{} sh -c "echo {}; ls {}"

In this example, the subshell command ls -d */; echo lists all directories in the current directory and appends a newline character to the end of the output. The output is then forwarded using the pipe symbol to the xargs command. The -I{} flag tells xargs to use {} as a placeholder for each line of input, and the sh -c command executes the echo and ls commands for each line of input.

Conclusion

Pipe Mac is a powerful tool that can help programmers achieve more complex tasks using the pipelining of multiple shell commands. Its ease of use and support for subshells make it a valuable addition to any programmer's toolkit.