I believe the rc feature exemplified in the link is actually equivalent to that used in the this bash idiom:<p>$ cmp &#60;(old) &#60;(new)<p>(only the braces differ). The author of the article describes a case in which the command in question (unlike cmp) cannot read its input from a pipe such as this, namely xdvi. So for instance<p>$ cat file.dvi | xdvi<p>or<p>$ xdvi &#60;(file.dvi)<p>would not work due to the nature of xdvi, but one could use<p>$ cat file.dvi | tmp xdvi<p>as a shorthand for<p>$ cat file.dvi &#62; /tmp/blah
 $ xdvi /tmp/blah
 $ rm /tmp/blah<p>(of course using cat this way would be stupid, but suppose that the file data is going to stdout via a command such as curl, as in the article, and it becomes non-trivial).<p>I really like the characterization of these commands as sort of second-order and I like the 2 new ones offered here (although I try not to get too addicted to command line features that aren't going to be around when I'm hopping from server to server).