Hehe, I forgot about the pipeline function. I had originally written that for something else and then repurposed it here. It always felt like something that ought to be built in to python.

And I guess I'm kind of grading "easy" on a curve here, because the first build tool I tried for bioinformatics was GNU Make, and it was not up to the task, even when I exploited all the special GNU features to the hilt.