Pipecut is a new Unix utliity for interactively developing command pipelines. A proof-of-concept version was demonstrated at MeetBSD California, Nov 1st, 2014

2. Note: About these slides
• Original slides from the presentation follow
– The slides are light on content, because I present
without reading the slides. You probably want to
watch the video instead of reading these. The
slides were originally made in Inkscape / Jessyink
• Past the end, I’ve included a few additional
slides with details about pipecut that were
demonstrated interactively

12. (Switch to a shell and show example
commands)

14. Additional information about pipecut
• The previous slide was the end of the deck
used for the presentation at MeetBSD, it was
followed by a demonstration of the tool.
• The code for pipecut will be hosted here:
• https://code.google.com/p/pipecut/
• Project homepage:
• http://www.pipecut.org/

15. What is pipecut?
• A tool for developing Unix pipeline command
lines more quickly and easily
• An interactive, vi-like curses interface that lets
you see the data and edit the command pipeline
on the same screen (no need to run and quit
more/less over and over again)
• A way to save useful commands and recall them
later, or share them with others

16. How does pipecut make commandline
development faster & easier? 1/2
• Single-keypress hotkeys for adding common Unix
commands
• Real-time highlighting of matches while typing regular
expressions
• The ability to see the data transformation applied instantly
as you add a ‘blade’ on the command line. See just one
screenful, or process the entire data file
• The ability to browse the state of the data at any stage by
using the cursor keys (left and right) to ‘scrub’ through the
‘blades’

17. How does pipecut make commandline
development faster & easier? 2/2
• Works with every existing Unix command by using pipe(2)
and treating it as a black-box – just works better with built-in
commands
• Optionally, start with your familiar environment on the
command line, and run history | pipecut to take your
pipeline into the pipecut environment
• Give a ‘toolset’ and name and description, and it gets saved
in your SQLite toolbox for use again later
• With one keypress, generate a shell script that executes
your toolset.

18. What else will pipecut do in the
future? 1/3
• Generate code that runs your toolset in other
target languages.
• Generate its own regression tests by comparing
internal/external command implementations and
generated code results
• Provide accelerated implementations for
command combinations such as ‘sort | uniq –c |
sort –nr’ where a counted hashmap can be more
efficient than standalone commands without
context of how the data will be processed next
(executing in pipecut, or in generated code)

19. What else will pipecut do in the
future? 2/3
• Add interactive support for more utilities’
arguments (Regex, field-references, byte-references)
• Static analysis of regular expressions (e.g.
highlight syntactical and semantic errors)
• Optimization of pipeline display to users’
tastes (e.g. egrep –v ‘foo’ | egrep –v ‘bar’ vs
egrep –v ‘foo|bar’ )
• Remappable keyboard commands

20. What else will pipecut do in the
future? 3/3
• Interactive command help
• Possess a deep understanding of command
line options on each utility
• Allow user to force Regex highlighting mode
while typing black-box commands

21. Pipecut
• The code for pipecut will be hosted here:
• https://code.google.com/p/pipecut/
• Project homepage:
• http://www.pipecut.org/
• Target for first release – Dec 24th, 2014