I could not agree more. And even with the things you mentioned, such a script will still be tiny and very readable.
You just have to love the simplicity.
You just have to love the simplicity.
For example, it's typical text processing pipelines are hard to branch. I have hacked up some solutions, but never found them very elegant. I would love to hear some solutions to this. Ended up switching to Clojure (Prismatic's) Graph.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but it sounds like you should use "tee" pointing at a fifo.
How to do it without iterating the file 2 times? You can do while of course, but it defeats the reason to use shell.
I would love to have two-way grep that writes matching lines to stdout and nonmatching to stderr. I wonder if grep maintainers would accept new option for grep "--two-way".
Personally though, I'd output to temporary files. The extra cost in disk usage and lack of pipelining is made up for by the easier debugging, and most shell pipelines aren't so slow that they need that level of optimization.