For what it's worth, I often do something like this: (!) = flip ($) Which then allows me to do things like mycommand ! grep "error" ! sort ! uniq ! w

For what it's worth, I often do something like this: (!) = flip ($) Which then allows me to do things like mycommand ! grep "error" ! sort ! uniq ! wc lineCount Which is nice because it visually resembles `|` (which is a reserved symbol in Haskell). Similarly for fmap: (<!>) = flip (<$>) result <- get <!> table <!> lookup "foo" print result ! liftIO Or for function composition: (~>) = flip (.) doStuff = reverse ~> head ~> negate ~> print doStuff [1,2,3] That being said, lisp does seem far more suited to shell programming than Haskell, because every function is variadic. What would probably be nice (and probably has been done) is a Lisp with syntax extended to include a few symbols to allow bash commands like |, >, etc: $ def nth-line (n) (read a | head -(n) | tail -n 1) $ ssh -i .ssh/some.pem (python show_servers.py | grep 'cool server' | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | nth-line 1)