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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Instead of:

    $ fortune > my_fortune.txt
    $ say -f my_fortune.txt

One could use the underrated (bashism) process substitution:

    $ say -f <(fortune)

Which works wonders for e.g diff'ing live:

    $ diff <(ssh elvis ls -1 foo) <(ls -1 bar)

Why would you even bother with that when `say` can take a string or read from stdin?

Just use

    $ say $(fortune)

    $ fortune | say -f-

For bonus coolness, add "-i" (it prints the lines and highlights the current word during reading).

Because it's fun spawning a new process and watching the otherwise idle cores of your box reach 0.1% usage for a millisecond.

Don't all three of those commands spawn new processes?

Not _shell_ processes, no.

Not all commands accept input as arguments, so it's still a good trick to know.