Question

I have a proprietary command-line program that I want to call in a bash script. It has several options in a .conf file that are not available as command-line switches. I can point the program to any .conf file using a switch, -F.

I would rather not manage a .conf file separate from this script. Is there a way to create a temporary document to use a .conf file?

I tried the following:

echo setting=value|my_prog -F -

But it does not recognize the - as stdin.

Answer 1

You can try /dev/stdin instead of -.

You can also use a here document:

my_prog -F /dev/stdin <<OPTS
opt1 arg1
opt2 arg2
OPTS

Finally, you can let bash allocate a file descriptor for you (if you need stdin for something else, for example):

my_prog -F <(cat <<OPTS
opt1 arg1
opt2 arg2
OPTS
)