Shell Command Substitution
The other day I wanted to diff a pair of files on two different hosts, stg1 and stg2. Normally, I would do so by copying on of the files to the other host, or grabbing them both onto my workstation with scp; “there must be a better way,” I thought.
Enter command substitution, a process by which you use the output from an executed command as the input to another. Many people have used this in a simple manner such as ls /usr/src/linux-`uname -r`which takes the output of uname -r, namely the kernel release you’re running, and uses that to flesh out the ls command. There is a more complicated form, however, that I use for diffing remote files. In the aforementioned example, I used the following command to diff the files:
vimdiff <(ssh stg1 cat /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd) <(ssh stg2 cat /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd)
Much like a subselect in MySQL, the cat commands are executed on the remote machine and then piped to vimdiff allowing for single command, no-file-copying diffs.