Pip version 1.2
INTRODUCTION
Some programs (often those from a non-Unix background) don't read input from stdin, nor write to stdout. Instead, they make you specify an 'input file' and an 'output file' on the command line. At least most Unix programs that do this let you use the special filename '-' to mean stdin or stdout, but there are some programs that don't recognize this convention.
Sometimes this is for technical reasons, because the input needs to be seekable. Sometimes it is because the author didn't think it would be useful and is probably a Pascal sympathizer :-). But in any case, it is annoying not to be able to use such programs in pipelines.
Pip fixes this problem. It wraps such programs and lets you give filenames of '-' as you would with any other. However pip doesn't know whether '-' should mean stdin or stdout, so you must tell it with the -i or -o flags.
For example, to convert the program 'stupid', which takes an input filename and an output filename, to be a filter:
pip -io stupid - -
Also pip's -I and -O flags can help with programs that do use stdin and stdout but require them to be seekable and so cannot be used in the middle of pipelines. More advanced uses and examples are documented in the manual page.
TeX and LaTeX
pip is fairly general and works for 90% of the annoying DOSish programs out there, but it won't handle more complex programs like TeX that generate multiple output files. The separate programs pip_(la)tex wrap (La)TeX, turning it into a filter that reads source from stdin and writes a DVI file to stdout. For example,
pip_latex <filename.tex | pip -i xdvi -
to quickly format and view a LaTeX source file. See the documentation at the start of 'pip_tex' for how it handles TeX's error messages and logs.
There's also pip_latex2html which is a wrapper for the latex2html program.
CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE
Added -I and -O options, for commands which can use stdin and stdout but require them to be seekable. Added a more polite check for the File::Temp module on perls which don't have it as standard (5.005 and earlier).
INSTALLING
As for Perl modules:
% perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/usr/local # or whatever
% make
% make test
% make install
(The 'make test' stage may fail on Windows because there is no 'cat' program installed.)
AUTHOR AND COPYING
Copyright 2003 Ed Avis. See the file COPYING for copying conditions. There is no warranty.
Please contact me with any suggestions or bug reports.
Ed Avis <ed@membled.com>
These programs have a web page at
<http://membled.com/work/apps/pip>.