I have a script that outputs a few lines and I want to have it open in an editor on my system (nano, vim, whatever) to be ready to edit. However I don’t want to save it to a temporary file or variable but directly in the editor (I think I need to bring the out somehow into the editor’s buffer).
I naively have tried something like this (I was thinking I could pipe the output into nano somehow):
echo "test" | nano # throws Too many errors from stdin
Alternatively I thought of opening the output like it’s a file:
nano $(echo "test")
It opens only the editor but it’s empty. Is this even possible or is a temp file strictly necessary?
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Answer
You can do
echo 'test' | nano -
The - option tells nano to read from stdin rather than a file. This is an editor specific solution though. A more robust solution would require temporary files, which you can use mktemp for.