Possible to grab a text from a online .txt file via bash?

Is it possible to grab text from a online text file via grep/cat/awk or someting else? (in bash)

The way i currently do this is i download the text file to the drive and grep/cat into the file for it's text.

curl -o "$TMPDIR"/"text.txt" http://www.example.com/text.txt

cat/grep "$TMPDIR"/text.txt

rm -rf "$TMPDIR"/"text.txt"

Is one of the text grabbers (or another one) capable enough to grab something from a text file on the in开发者_开发百科ternet? This would get rid of the whole downloadfile-readfile-deletefile process and just replace it with one command, speeding up things considerably if you have a lot of those strings.

I couldn't find anything via the man pages or googling around, maybe you guys know something.

Use curl -o - http://www.example.com/text.txt | grep "something".

-o - tells curl that it "downloads to stdout", other utils such as wget, lynx and links also have corresponding functionality.

You might try netcat - this is exactly what it was made for.

You could at least pipe your commands to avoid manually creating a temporary file:

curl … | cat/grep …