Re: "here strings" and tmpfiles

[Eduardo A . Bustamante López]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 05:18:10PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> hi bash developers--
(...)
>  a) use socketpair(2) or pipe(2) instead of making a tmpfile.  this has
>     the potential downside that the semantics of access to the remaining
>     file descriptor would be subtly different from "regular file"
>     semantics.

Disclaimer: not a bash developer, just a user.

I don't think the implementation details of herestrings are documented anywhere,
and I'm not too sure if they should (i.e. IMO if you need that degree of control
over the implementation details, then you should use something other than
shell).


Having said that, have you tried process substitution as an option?

You should be able to do something like:


  mycommand < <(printf %s 'super secret')


That will:

- not write the 'super secret' string to the file-system, nor
- show the mentioned string in the process tree (because printf is a bash
  built-in command, and thus, does not require a fork).