How to pipe input to sublimetext on linux?

linux bash pipe stdin sublimetext
wim picture wim · Jan 14, 2014 · Viewed 9.5k times · Source

How do I receive text from stdin into sublimetext editor? With vim it works like this:

echo "potato potato potato" | vim -

The same thing works with gedit, creating a new document with the contents.

Sublimetext seems to just start editing a file called "-" in a new tab, is there some other shell trick which could work?

Answer

tylerl picture tylerl · Jun 24, 2015

The simplest solution if your sublime installation doesn't support opening STDIN (e.g. current version on Linux) is to dump the output to a temporary file, open the file in sublime, and then delete the file. I created a script called tosubl in my bin directory as follows:

#!/bin/bash

TMPDIR=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}  # default to /tmp if TMPDIR isn't set
F=$(mktemp $TMPDIR/tosubl-XXXXXXXX)
cat >| $F  # use >| instead of > if you set noclobber in bash
subl $F
sleep .3  # give subl a little time to open the file
rm -f $F  # file will be deleted as soon as subl closes it

Then you can use it by doing something like this:

$ ifconfig | tosubl

Related questions

Read values into a shell variable from a pipe

I am trying to get bash to process data from stdin that gets piped into, but no luck. What I mean is none of the following work: echo "hello world" | test=($(< /dev/stdin)); echo test=$test test= echo "hello …

Read More
Split output of command by columns using Bash?

I want to do this: run a command capture the output select a line select a column of that line Just as an example, let's say I want to get the command name from a $PID (please note this is …

Read More
Pass a password to ssh in pure bash

I want to pass a password to ssh using a bash script (Yes, I know that there are ssh keys that I could use, but this is not what I intend). I found some solutions that were using expect but …

Read More