Can firefox render from stdin?

**Peepsalot** · July 11th, 2006

I have an idea for a script which would generate some html based on results of a grep command. I would like to be able to view these results directly in firefox, preferably without writing a file to disk first. Is there any way to pipe input to firefox like that?

**dabear** · July 11th, 2006

Originally Posted by Peepsalot

I have an idea for a script which would generate some html based on results of a grep command. I would like to be able to view these results directly in firefox, preferably without writing a file to disk first. Is there any way to pipe input to firefox like that?

Sorry, I could not find any flag to pass to fx to manage this. However, this will work

Code:

tmpfilename="/tmp/tmp.html";#should be absolute path
htmlstring="<html><strong>Your html here..</strong></html>"

echo $htmlstring >$tmpfilename;
firefox "file://$tmpfilename";rm $tmpfilename #removes tempfile after use

**Peepsalot** · July 11th, 2006

Ok. I didn't try that because I thought there would be a problem with firefox not finishing loading before the file was deleted.

But it works so I guess that's not really a problem. Thanks.

**fluffington** · July 11th, 2006

Originally Posted by Peepsalot

Ok. I didn't try that because I thought there would be a problem with firefox not finishing loading before the file was deleted.

Wouldn't you have to start Firefox in the background to do that (firefox "file://$tmpfilename" &;rm $tmpfilename)? As it is, it waits 'til Firefox quits before deleting anything.

**Peepsalot** · July 11th, 2006

Originally Posted by fluffington

Wouldn't you have to start Firefox in the background to do that (firefox "file://$tmpfilename" &;rm $tmpfilename)? As it is, it waits 'til Firefox quits before deleting anything.

Yeah, but if firefox is already open, it will load new tab, and the sript will continue without waiting for Firefox to close.

It still works...i was just not too sure about it before.

**Peepsalot** · July 11th, 2006

Check this out. I posted the same question on the mozillazine forums and got an answer pointing me to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data:_URI_scheme
It's pretty cool.