I've released v0.2 of PipeController, my experimental tool to simulate pipes in Python. It can be downloaded here: http://dancingbison.com/pipe_controller-v0.2.zip Changes in v0.2: - module name changed to avoid clashes with pipes module in the standard Python library; the module is now called pipe_controller.py instead of pipes.py; - you can now pass input and output filename arguments on the command in your program that calls PipeController, instead of having to use I/O redirection; - you can now import class PipeController from the module, with: from pipe_controller import PipeController - you can now run a PipeController pipe incrementally, i.e., run the pipe in a loop, adding a pipe component (a Python function) in each iteration, and it can save the intermediate outputs resulting from each iteration, to separate output files; the program test_pipe_controller_03.py in the download package shows how to do this. This feature can be useful to debug your pipe's logic, and also to save the intermediate computation results in case they are of use in their own right. Blog post about using PipeController v0.2 to run a pipe incrementally: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/using-pipecontroller-to-run-pipe.html - Vasudev Ram www.dancingbison.com jugad2.blogspot.com twitter.com/vasudevram