Edit data in pipe with your favorite editor

Each coder has its favorite editor and enjoy to use it whenever possible.
But, when using pipe on unix-based or inspirated OS, text manipulation are only avalaible with programs like sed or awk.

The following code is a shell port of the vipe program of Joey Hess's moreutils package, allowing you to edit data in pipe with your favorite editor.

Edit your ~/.bashrc and add following lines:

function vipe()
{
   TMP_FILE=$(mktemp);
   cat > $TMP_FILE;
   [ -n "$EDITOR" ] && $EDITOR $TMP_FILE;
   cat $TMP_FILE;
   rm $TMP_FILE;
}

Then, refresh your shell if needed:

. ~/.bashrc

Now, with the EDITOR environment variable pointing to your favorite editor, you can edit data in pipe:

echo 'abcdefgh' | vipe | sed 's/a/1/g'