Pipes

From Arnout Engelen

The commandline is really powerful, but scripts can be tricky to debug. a UI for that might be nice.

Contents 1 Interface 2 Features 3 Examples 3.1 xmlformat 3.2 mpd 4 Related software

[edit] Interface

Using colours for:

• globbing (allow click, replaces command by 'echo "Globbed filenames: .."'?)
• backticks (allow click, replaces by 'echo "Would be executing: "')
• special controls (like 'for')
• Distinguishing between files (in which data is stored) and programs (which are ran and get the data in stdin). A file can have a backticked command as filename.

Pipes:

• > | and <. show data coming though? (esp. |)

[edit] Features

Basically it should be some kind of IDE for a subset of Bash, I guess.

• support pasting in a random bash oneliner for visualisation: usually you won't know you need Pipes until you do.
• 'graphical' representation of script?
• for loops
• backticks
• big red 'run' button
• 'breakpoints'?
• adding 'viewers' to a pipe, when run will show
• toggle for showing STDERR (might clutter things)

[edit] Examples

cat /usr/share/dict/british-english-large | grep ^.....ious$ | perl -pe s/...\(.*\)us/\$1.us/ | sort | uniq | while read line ; do whois $line >> /tmp/foo ; done

• look into pipes

[edit] xmlformat

for i in /tmp/foo/*.xml ; do xmlformat $i > /tmp/bar/`basename $i` ; done

http://www.bzzt.net/~arnouten/pipes/xmlformat.svg

What should be accessible in not too many clicks:

• what does /tmp/foo/*.xml expand to?
• what does basename $i expand to?
• what filenames are written to?
• what commands are executed?

[edit] mpd

NAME=`mpc | head  -1 | sed "s/.*\///;s/.*- //"`;
bluemote --send "> Status \"$NAME\""

Accessible:

• output of pipe

[edit] Related software

• pipe (limited: doesn't seem to be aware of options/parameteres, backticks, not sure if it does viewing pipes)
• paip (doesn't seem to be geared towards calling external apps)