Question

Hypothetical situation. I have a command line program in *nix (linux, BSD, etc.). It was written so that you pass it a text file as an argument

$ program file.txt

Run the program, it looks at the text in file.txt.

Is it possible to “trick” this program into accepting input from a file stream rather than reading a file via disk? I’m pretty comfortable using unix pipes to do stuff, but there’s still something a little mysterious about their internals that make it so I can’t say (definitively) yes or not to the above question.

Answer 1

bash lets you do this:

program <(otherprogram)

This uses the output of otherprogram as the contents of a file passed to program.