in reply to Re^2: passing pipes on the command line
in thread passing pipes on the command line

hmm.. nice... so that just passes a FIFO as the filename...
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Re^4: passing pipes on the command line
by Mugatu (Monk) on Mar 23, 2005 at 20:39 UTC

    Exactly. It's a very nice trick when you have a program that expects to read from a file, and has no facilities for reading from STDIN. A common example is diff:

    diff <(grep foo file1 | sort -u) \
     <(grep foo file2 | sort -u)

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    Of course, we have rapidly veered off topic for the Monastery, so I digress. :-)

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      Sure, it's very useful. Of course, diff can read one of its inputs from stdin, so you can use 

      grep foo file1 | sort -u | diff - <( grep foo file2 | sort -u )

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