I've been trying to get emacs to read data from stdin but haven't figured it out yet. On OSX I started doing this for a script I had written. The script would get data from a remote source, do stuff to the data, and then output that data to stdout. I'd pipe that data to the command line TextWrangler tool edit, which just worked.
To get this working with vi, I learnt that one could do something like
./perlscript someargument | vi -
I am looking for something equivalent for emacs.