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I'm looking for an image viewer that takes data on stdin and can be run like:

cat image.png | imageviewer
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3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

ImageMagick's display program will do just that, assuming you pipe it something that it understands.

cat image.png | display

and it'll pop up a window showing that image.

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up vote 3 down vote

ImageMagick's display.

display < foo.png
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up vote 2 down vote

On Linux (and likely BSDs), almost all of them – if you give /dev/stdin as the path. This includes: xloadimage, feh, Eye of GNOME (eog).

eog /dev/stdin < "$file"

(Not all of them work well with special files, though. GThumb failed the test, for example.)

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This doesn't work: cat graph.png | eog /dev/stdin – bukzor Apr 13 '11 at 16:03
If we know "$file", i think we can issue eog "$file".Am I missing something? – Naga Kiran Jun 20 '11 at 18:27
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@Naga: The < "$file" was an example. The point was whether the program can accept an arbitrary stream, be it a simple redirection or something more advanced (such as providing an image via stdin, a named pipe, process substitution, a socket, or a character device). The problem is that many viewers require the fd to be seekable, which only regular files and block devices are. – grawity Jun 20 '11 at 18:56
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As @bukzor pointed out, cat graph.png | eog /dev/stdin fails, but eog /dev/stdin < graph.png works. – Denilson Sá Jan 3 at 17:18
Is there any way to make this method work with piping (|) as well? – Tarrasch May 12 at 16:05
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