Question

a newbie to shell programming here.

I have this codes so far:

prog inputfile outputfile1

sort -rn outputfile1 | cut -f1-2 > outputfile2

My question is there a way to pipe the outputfile directly from the first command to the second to get outputfile2, i.e. skipping the need to create an outputfile1? prog is a custom program that takes inputfile and outpufile names as parameters.

The closest thing I have found is substitution in shell, e.g.

sort <(ls dir)

But it’s not really helpful in this case as I want to pipe the outputfile only and not the stdout.
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

If I get you right — the opposite:

prog inputfile >(sort -rn | cut -f1-2 >outputfile)

depending on the prog you may use

prog inputfile /dev/stdout | sort -rn | cut -f1-2 >outputfile

or even

prog inputfile - | sort -rn | cut -f1-2 >outputfile