3 · Files and media

smartpipe is multimodal end to end: PDFs, images, audio, and video are items like any other. This chapter teaches how files become items and how to control the cut.

Name the files

Files go after the prompt; each one becomes an item, whatever it is:

smartpipe map "Summarize this document" 'reports/*.pdf'
smartpipe map "What does the caller want?" 'calls/*.mp3'
smartpipe filter "shows a person" 'photos/*.jpg'

Quote the glob so your shell doesn't expand it. There is no parser to pick - smartpipe detects the kind, extracts text from documents, and carries media bytes to models that can see or hear them (converting and disclosing when they can't).

The granularity dial

A file is a crate of items; --as decides how it opens (the item has the laws):

smartpipe map "translate to French" 'notes/*.txt'                # one item per file
smartpipe map "translate to French" 'notes/*.txt' --as lines    # one item per line
cat poem.txt | smartpipe map "translate, keep the shape" --as file   # whole pipe = one item

Named .jsonl files cut into strict records automatically; a bad row is a loud error naming the file and line.

Peek before you spend

With no verb at all, the binary is the reader - see exactly what items a file yields:

smartpipe report.pdf | head -2
smartpipe notes.txt --as lines | head -3

Reading is free - zero model calls - with one deliberate exception: when you have configured an ocr-model, PDFs and images parse through it here too, exactly as they would in a verb (each use disclosed on stderr, --max-calls caps it). Unset, nothing ever calls out.

--dry-run on map/extend goes one step further: it prints the fully composed first request (system prompt, schema, and the first item's payload in its <input> block - records render as key: value lines, plain text rides unchanged) and exits without any model call.

Below the file: split

When one document is too big, or you want the pieces addressable:

smartpipe split --by pages:5 report.pdf | smartpipe map "summarize these pages"
smartpipe split --by minutes:10 call.wav | smartpipe map "what was agreed?"
smartpipe split --media 'decks/*.pptx' | smartpipe map "what does this chart claim?"

Audio slices stay audio (the next verb can hear them); every chunk carries __source provenance so downstream tools - and smartpipe write - know where it came from.

Next: 4 · The free verbs - cut the corpus before anything costs money.