> There are situations where named pipes fail, where you actually do need a plain file, and I can't think of a single one offhand. :) My go-to use-case for =()

> There are situations where named pipes fail, where you actually do need a plain file, and I can't think of a single one offhand. :) My go-to use-case for =() is okular =(dot -Tpdf foo.dot) PDF-viewers and its ilk typically don't work on non-files.