https://blog.thetextsmith.com/tags/pipes/ Recent content in Pipes on Under the Anvil Hugo en-us Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:29:01 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/the-unix-view-of-text-files-are-streams-not-pages/ Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:29:01 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/the-unix-view-of-text-files-are-streams-not-pages/ Many people learn the Unix slogan “everything is a file.” That’s true, but I almost think the more profound slogan is: “Everything is a stream waiting to be read or written.” This last of our three-part series on working with streams demonstrates why it is appropriate to adopt the stream mentality rather than the page mentality when working with files. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/thinking-in-transformations-why-textsmiths-love-search-and-replace/ Thu, 06 Aug 2026 07:58:28 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/thinking-in-transformations-why-textsmiths-love-search-and-replace/ One of the greatest changes that happens when someone becomes a textsmith is not learning a new command. It is learning a new way of thinking. This second of the three-part series on working with streams delves into the psychology of a textsmith. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/before-you-reach-for-sed-master-bash-parameter-expansion/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:28:53 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/before-you-reach-for-sed-master-bash-parameter-expansion/ One of the habits that gradually changes a person’s shell scripting style is discovering that Bash can manipulate text on its own. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/programming-as-composition/ Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:35:01 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/programming-as-composition/ Most programming books begin with variables, loops, and functions. A textsmith, however, encounters programming from the opposite direction: composition. Before writing a single if statement, they are already composing grep, sort, awk, sed, pandoc, and dozens of other tools into something larger. By the time they sit down to learn a programming language, they have already been programming—they simply didn’t call it that.