Software Tools in Haskell: wye

write stdin to files and stdout

This page is part of a series on Software Tools in Haskell.

This post is literate Haskell; you can load the source into GHCi and play along.

As usual, we start with some imports.

-- wye: write stdin to files and stdout
module Main where

import System.Exit (exitSuccess)
import System.Environment (getArgs)
import Data.List (unfoldr)
import System.IO
  ( openFile, hClose
  , IOMode(AppendMode,WriteMode), hPutStrLn
  )

wye acts like the standard tool tee; it writes stdin to one or more files as well as stdout. It takes one argument: --append opens the given files in append mode rather than (default) overwrite mode. Since this program processes lines from stdin one at a time, we use file handles rather than writing files all in one go. We have to be sure to close these file handles before exiting.

main :: IO ()
main = do
  args <- getArgs

  -- interpret arguments
  handles <- do
    let
      (mode,rest) = case args of
        ("--append":xs) -> (AppendMode,xs)
        xs              -> (WriteMode, xs)

    mapM (\name -> openFile name mode) rest


  let
    split str = do
      putStrLn str
      mapM_ (\handle -> hPutStrLn handle str) handles

  lineFilterIO split

  mapM_ hClose handles

  exitSuccess

wye is useful for inspecting data as it flows through a pipeline, maybe for debugging purposes. For instance, if the final output of a pipeline like

foo | bar | baz | qux

is not what we expect, we can inspect the intermediate data with

foo | wye a.txt | bar | wye b.txt | baz | wye c.txt | qux

Old Stuff

lineFilterIO :: (String -> IO ()) -> IO ()
lineFilterIO f = do
  xs <- fmap getLines getContents
  sequence_ $ map f xs


-- split on \n
getLines :: String -> [String]
getLines = unfoldr firstLine
  where
    firstLine :: String -> Maybe (String, String)
    firstLine xs = case break (== '\n') xs of
      ("","")   -> Nothing
      (as,"")   -> Just (as,"")
      (as,b:bs) -> Just (as,bs)