[Feature] imgcat `url`

[Jeff-Tian]

cat image by url is great

[eddieantonio]

Hi Jeff. Thanks for the issue! As imgcat wishes to follow the UNIX philosophy of creating small, composable utilities that do one task well, I do not think integrating a URL fetcher into imgcat is an appropriate use of maintenance resources. Because of this composability, you can already display images by URL with imgcat by combining it with curl:

imgcat <(curl -s https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tar.png)

Here's a small shell wrapper that gives you this functionality:

# Add this to your shell startup file, e.g., ~/zshrc, ~/.bash_profile, or ~/.bashrc:
function imgcat-url() {
    imgcat <(curl -sf "$1")
}

I encourage you to expand and experiment with the above example.

Then you get the desired functionality:

imgcat-url https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tar.png

I hope this helps. Thanks again for getting in touch!

[Jeff-Tian]

Hi @eddieantonio , sorry to ask a dumb question, I tried put the imgcat-url to a imgcaturl.sh file, and tried execute sh imgcaturl.sh, it gives error:

line 2: syntax error near unexpected token `('
line 2: `    imgcat <(curl -sf "$1")'

Do you know where is wrong?

[eddieantonio]

Hi @Jeff-Tian. It turns out the syntax I gave you only works in a #!/bin/bash script; it will not work in a #!/bin/sh script, which is the default. As such, please add the line

#!/bin/bash

...as the topmost line in the file. This is called the shebang line, and it tells your system which interpreter to use (it should be using bash!)

[Jeff-Tian]

Hi @eddieantonio thanks for your reply! Now I know it's a bash syntax, great.

I found I can use the following syntax that works with sh too:

curl -sf https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tar.png | imgcat