With some redirection magic it can be made to, but I find that magic is always too much stuffing around to make it useful. Inside scripts though I like to pipe

With some redirection magic it can be made to, but I find that magic is always too much stuffing around to make it useful. Inside scripts though I like to pipe to vim and have it output to a file: pipeline | vim - +"file $mytempfile" Then if you quit vim without saving $mytempfile won't exist, if you save and quit it will and further processing can be done. I've got a view scripts like this to to things like viewing csv files after being piped through column, after saving they're converted back to csv.