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unixbrowserpipei3

How do you make command2 wait for command1 to exit when executing command1 | command2?

I'm trying to pipe the output of dmenu to surf (browser) in order to browse a selected URL. I'm doing:

cat ~/.surf/bookmarks | dmenu | surf

but surf starts before dmenu has exited with my chosen URL. This means it doesn't open with the correct URL. I don't see what the problem is because dmenu prints the URL to standard output after a choice is made, and surf works taking a URL as its argument. To clarify, the bookmarks file just contains URLs on separate lines.

I'm using this in i3, as a bindsym. I also tried 

surf (cat ~/.surf/bookmarks | dmenu)

fish shell syntax, as that is my shell. Thanks in advance.

Solution

  • As mentioned in tkauusl's comment, surf should get the URL as a command line argument, not piped to stdin.

    For bash and POSIX compatible shells you can use this syntax:

    surf $(cat ~/.surf/bookmarks | dmenu)

    For other shells you might have to use

    surf `cat ~/.surf/bookmarks | dmenu`

    If the URL can contain spaces, you should quote the result of the command substitution. 

    surf "$(cat ~/.surf/bookmarks | dmenu)"