That said, that might not be the best example, because that same first command w...

geophile · on Feb 14, 2019

OK, how about this:

    osh timer 1 ^ \
        f 't: (t, processes())' ^ \
        expand 1 ^ 
        f 't, p: (p.pid, int(t), p.commandline)' ^ 
        sql "insert into process values(%s, %s, %s)"

- timer 1: Generate a timestamp every second.

- f 't: (t, processes())': Take the timestamp as input and generate a timestamp and sequence of Process objects.

- expand 1: Expand the sequence of Processes, so that there is one per output tuple, e.g. (123, (p1, p2)) -> (123, p1), (123, p2).

- f 't, p: (p.pid, int(t), p.commandline)': Take the timestamp and Process as input, and generate (pid, timestamp as int, command line) as output.

- sql "insert into process values(%s, %s, %s)": Take the triples from the previous command and dump them into a table in a database.