Yo dawg, I heard you like pipes, so I put a pipe in your pipe, so you can pipe streams while you pipe streams

unix-pipes.R

library(magrittr)

write.table(iris, file="iris.txt", sep="\t", row.names=FALSE, quote=FALSE)

plines <- function(cmd) readLines(pipe(cmd))
ptabs <- function(cmd) read.delim(pipe(cmd))
 
# just as a trivial example, process some shuffled lines using GNU shuf, sort,
# etc. (we could do this in R, but this is to simulate command line operations)

   
ptabs("gshuf iris.txt | sort -k5,5 -k1,1n | cut -d '\t' -f 1,2") %>% plot

So can this be done without writing the file to disk, e.g., ptabs(input, cmd)? Perhaps with fifo()?