This weekend the proper environment settled out for sorting a pet peeve that shows up every once in a while when coding: writing logic that interacts with other applications in the system via their stdin and stdout streams is often more involved than it should be, which seems pretty ironic when sitting in front of a Unix-like system.

Rather than going over the trouble of setting up pipes and hooking them up in a custom way, often applications end up just delegating the job to /bin/sh, which is not ideal for a number of reasons: argument formatting isn’t straightforward, injecting custom application-defined logic is hard, which means even simple tasks that might be easily achieved by the language end up shelling out to further external applications, and so on.

In an attempt to address that, I’ve spent some time working on an experimental Go package that is being released today: pipe.

I hope you like it as well, and please drop me a note if you find any issues.