Sorry to disappoint, but there is no way you can reliably do that. You could possibly figure out back to the cat q1.data command, by grabbing the output of ps (as I assume you're on a *nix system), but you have to realize that q_graph is seeing as input whatever the shell is feeding it from the output of q_sort, just as if you had typed it in at the command line.
Grandfather's suggestion is a good one; it refashions the problem so as to take more control over the process. Does that give you what you need to achieve a solution?
In reply to Re: Collecting a piped command line
by liverpole
in thread Collecting a piped command line
by sweetser
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