Piped input to nano

Question

Why does ls | nano - open the editor in Ubuntu but close the editor and save a file to -.save in CentOS?

How can I get nano in CentOS to remain open when reading stdin?

What are the nano versions in those distributions? Maybe the different behavior comes from an older version.. — daniel kullmann, Oct 08 '12 at 06:45
If your shell is `bash` try with process substitution: `nano <( ls )`. — manatwork, Nov 12 '12 at 14:13

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 11 '20 at 12:04

4

The feature wasn't added until version 2.2

http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/TODO

For version 2.2:

Allow nano to work like a pager (read from stdin) [DONE]

If you decided you want the latest version, you can download from the upstream site (http://www.nano-editor.org/download.php) and then follow the Fedora guide to build your own RPM. (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package)

edited Jun 11 '20 at 12:04

Community

answered Apr 04 '14 at 10:08

beardedlinuxgeek

Or you can use the rpms provided by them. See https://www.nano-editor.org/dist/ then version then the rpm folder for red Hat/ fedora/ centos compatible rpms. – cde Apr 05 '18 at 06:11

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 12 '12 at 13:26

2

I think that this is text editor "feature" and nano doesn't have that.

you can use 2 steps:

ls > output.txt
nano output.txt

There are 2 other editors which can use stdin for data input

ls | joe
ls | jed

answered Nov 12 '12 at 13:26

manuel

2 Answers2