I believe the rc feature exemplified in the link is actually equivalent to that used in the this bash idiom: $ cmp <(old) <(new) (only the braces differ). The

I believe the rc feature exemplified in the link is actually equivalent to that used in the this bash idiom: $ cmp <(old) <(new) (only the braces differ). The author of the article describes a case in which the command in question (unlike cmp) cannot read its input from a pipe such as this, namely xdvi. So for instance $ cat file.dvi | xdvi or $ xdvi <(file.dvi) would not work due to the nature of xdvi, but one could use $ cat file.dvi | tmp xdvi as a shorthand for $ cat file.dvi > /tmp/blah $ xdvi /tmp/blah $ rm /tmp/blah (of course using cat this way would be stupid, but suppose that the file data is going to stdout via a command such as curl, as in the article, and it becomes non-trivial). I really like the characterization of these commands as sort of second-order and I like the 2 new ones offered here (although I try not to get too addicted to command line features that aren't going to be around when I'm hopping from server to server).