Edit Text Without Using Files

Lots of times on engagements i'll have to take a big chunk of data, for example user credentials, and parse/format them a particular way. Typically it can be done quickly by placing the text into a small temp file, and then parsing the contents that way.

The problem is that you are then left with a bunch of crap files you dont need. Granted, i could just put everything in the /tmp folder, or create another temp folder alltogether, but i didnt want to have to deal with files at all.

In come here documents. Here documents are awesome for stuff like this. Take this example:


cat <<EOFMEOW | awk '{print $3}'
>ZOMG THE TEXT
>IT GOES HERE
>WHERE?
>IT GOES HERE LOLZ
>EOFMEOW

TEXT
HERE
HERE


Now all i need to do is just paste the text once it spits back the '>' prompt.