How to pipe from clipboard to firefox?

Question

This might be a amateur question. But I have a problem with piping. I want to pipe my clipboard to firefox via the terminal. In my clipboard is a url like https://www.google.com. Than I want open firefox like

firefox https://www.google.com

Now I want to replace the google URL by something of my clipboard. I tried to pipe it like:

xclip -o -selection clipboard | firefox
xclip -o -selection clipboard > url ; firefox url
xclip -o -selection clipboard > url ; cat url | firefox /dev/fd/0

All 3 aren't working.

Any suggestions on how I could solve this?

Answer 1

Firefox only takes URLs as command line parameters, not as stdin, and these are distinct things. So the pipe is not broken, it's just the wrong tool.

You need one of the following:

• "Command substitution" using the $(…) or `…` operators:

  firefox $(xclip -o -selection clipboard)
  

• A program which does take input from stdin, and converts it to command-line arguments:

  xclip -o -selection clipboard | xargs firefox