How do you create a file (i.e. Gist) in bash?

Apple is shipping an older version of Bash, Bash 3.2; Bash 4 was released 5 years ago. Here are some possible ways to get around this:

• Install MacPorts , Homebrew or pkgsrc and install Bash through one of them; or just build and install it yourself from source . Remember to add the newly installed Bash to /etc/shells
  
  so you can set it as your shell, then go to System Preferences> Users & Groups, click the lock to specify your password so you can make changes, then right click (click two clicks / clicks) on your user to select "More options ..." and change your skin there.

• If you need to be compatible with the 7 year old Bash that comes with OS X, you can simply save the file and fix it from there. Here's a Bash example to make it easier:

  function curlsource() {
      f=$(mktemp -t curlsource)
      curl -o "$f" -s -L "$1"
      source "$f"
      rm -f "$f"
  }
  curlsource https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash
  
        
  
          
          
          
        
  
      

• If you absolutely must avoid creating a temporary file and must work in ancient versions of Bash, your best bet is to read into a string and evaluate the result. I tried to mimic the effect source <(cmd)
  
  by creating a FIFO (named pipe), injecting output into it cmd
  
  and reading it with source
  
  , but got nothing. It turns out, looking at the source for Bash 3.2, it source
  
  just reads the entire file into a line and checks the file size before that. The FIFO returns size 0 when you do stat
  
  , so source
  
  happily allocates a string of length 1 (for a trailing zero), reads 0 bytes into it, and returns success. So, since it source
  
  just reads the entire file into a string and then evaluates that, you can simply do the same:

  eval "$(curl -s -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash)"