TIL: How to Use Clipboard Data as File Input in Bash
Recently, I wanted to run a bash script where it needed to receive a JSON file as input. However, the JSON I had was taken from somewhere on the internet. In this case, it was taking a JSON blob and converting it to a nix attribute set. However, I didn’t want to save the contents to a file beforehand.
This is the command here as an example, note the /dev/stdin which acts as file like object for us.
wl-paste | json2nix /dev/stdin
So wl-paste returns the contents of our clipboard (our JSON). Then we pipe that over to our json2nix script which
expects a file. We can pretend to have a file by using the /dev/stdin 1