Process substitution in bash

Today I came across this little snippet of shell code bash <(curl -s https://codecov.io/bash). I found it in the documentation of Codecov, which is a code coverage tool mainly run in CI.

This "command structure" bash <(...) was entirely new to me. So I dug a little bit.

What you see there is called process substitution, and the definition of it is as follow:

Huh – that's interesting. So let's give this a try:

$ echo <(ls .)
/dev/fd/11

Okay, this is a file name. Let's try something else and look into the file using cat.

$ cat <(ls .)
README.md
assets
...
...

Interesting! Looking into this file path shows the files printed by the ls command.

How can you use process substitution then?

As you've seen, <(...) lets you use the output of a command as a written file.

(thx to crater2150 for this understandable explanation on stack exchange)

Process substitution is handy if you want to "pipe" something into a command that doesn't understand UNIX pipes. The codecov example shows that a bash script is downloaded from https://codecov.io/bash, the content is written to a file and bash executes this file. Pretty cool, hmm?

In a Node.js context, you can use it like this:

$ node <(echo 'console.log("foo")')
foo

But even more fantastic, you could use process substitution to execute stuff from your clipboard quickly. I'm on a Mac, which means I have the pbpaste command available to run JavaScript code in my clipboard with a single command.

$ node <(pbpaste)

In short: process substitution allows you to skip temporary files and write some fancy one-liners. Sweet! 🎉