Pipe UNIX output to BBEdit via the Terminal

Mar 31, '03 09:31:00AM

Contributed by: jzsimon

BBEdit's command line interface, bbedit, accepts input from stdin, displaying it in a new untitled document. What can this do for you? You can use BBEdit instead of cat or more or less to look at text output (or use it to edit/create a new file). Try these examples in the terminal:

 % echo "hello world" | bbedit
 % ls /Applications | bbedit
 % grep -i apple /etc/services | bbedit
 % zcat /var/log/system.log.0.gz | bbedit
Obviously, the possiblities are endless. And as flexible as less may be, BBEdit is substantially more Mac user-friendly. Note that this only works for the full version of BBEdit, not for BBEdit Lite.

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