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pipe is a transformation
pipe return an RDD created by piping elements to a forked external process.
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Snippet
pipe(command, env={})
Example with a Spark RDD - Spark Context (sc, sparkContext)
sc = spark.sparkContext
sc.parallelize(['1', '2', '', '3']).pipe('cat').collect()
[u'1', u'2', u'', u'3']