Pipe output from one command to another command's non standard input

Question

I would like to do something similar to the following:

which someapplciation | cd outputfrompreviouscommand

The command which provides a directory and I would like to be able to make that output my current working directory without using a programming language i.e. awk, bash, perl, etc. and to only use the pipe command.

To further give an example:

which vi

provides the output

/some/dir

I would like my working directory to be moved to that directory which I can test by using the pwd command which should have the output that matches of /some/dir.

Solution

You can't use a pipe if the second command you are running doesn't read from its standard input. However, you can do something like

cd $(which someapplication)

or, since you need a directory name for cd and not an executable name:

cd $(dirname $(which someapplication))

The $(...) shell operator executes the command within parentheses and substitutes its output into the command line.

Comments

[Jakob Bennemann]

Actually, which executable provides the output /path/to/executable, not its directory. So, cding to the output of which won't work.