[jlarocco]

> What would the non-shell interface to commands for text processing pipelining (e.g. sort, cut, grep, etc., all of which absolutely need options to function) have looked like? Some people to this day believe that any text processing more complicated than a simple grep or cut should be done in a stand-alone script written in a domain-specific language (e.g. Perl or awk), rather than piping shell commands to each other.

I have no idea what the original intention was, but I could see the interface being Emacs or Vi(m).

A workflow I use a lot in Emacs with eshell is to pipe command output to a buffer, manipulate the buffer using Emacs editting commands (including find/replace, macros, indent-region, etc.), and then run another shell command on it, write it to a file, or copy/paste it somewhere else.

It's not for every situation but it's a lot faster than coming up with a complicated shell "one-liner".

[msla]

The problem there is that you have to rethink your solution if you decide you want to turn your buffer manipulation into a reusable command. I like Emacs, but the easy transition from pipeline to shell script is a big point in pipelines' favor.

[jlarocco]

It's not really a problem, though. 9 times out of 10 shell one-liners are single use, and when they're not, I want something more readable than a one liner, anyway.

[layer8]

A general tool for that workflow is vipe: https://github.com/juliangruber/vipe