You could make curl read netrc from a pipe. Something like this should work: #!/bin/bash password=$(...) # replace with code to extract password from the

You could make curl read netrc from a pipe. Something like this should work: #!/bin/bash password=$(...) # replace with code to extract password from the the password manager generate_netrc() { printf 'machine www.example.org login foo password "%s"\n' "$password" } curl -v --netrc-file <(generate_netrc) http://www.example.org No need for sudo and no risk of hitting swap. :-)