A unix-like pipe operator in R to perform CLI operations (or call R functions)

unix.R

# a unix-like pipe operator in R to perform CLI operations (or call R functions)
`%|%` = function(x, command) {
    if (class(command) == 'function') {
        command(x)
    } else {
        stopifnot(class(x) %in% c('character', 'numeric', 'integer'))
        system(command, input=as.character(x), intern=TRUE)
    }
}

# examples:
paths %|% "grep -o [^/]+$"  # get file names from directories
mywords %|% "sed /foo/d"    # remove entries containing the word 'foo'
c(1:5) %|% sum              # use the R sum function

Here’s my unsolicited code review.