callback to handle completion of pipe

Streams are EventEmitters so you can listen to certain events. As you said there is a finish event for request (previously end).

 var stream = request(...).pipe(...);
 stream.on('finish', function () { ... });

For more information about which events are available you can check the stream documentation page.

Code snippet for piping content from web via http(s) to filesystem. As @starbeamrainbowlabs noticed event finish does job

var tmpFile = "/tmp/somefilename.doc";

var ws = fs.createWriteStream(tmpFile);
ws.on('finish', function() {
  // pipe done here, do something with file
});

var client = url.slice(0, 5) === 'https' ? https : http;
client.get(url, function(response) {
  return response.pipe(ws);
});

Based nodejs document, http://nodejs.org/api/stream.html#stream_event_finish, it should handle writableStream's finish event.

var writable = getWriteable();
var readable = getReadable();
readable.pipe(writable);
writable.on('finish', function(){ ... });