What's the best way to pass a string to a command line utility that requires a file?

Question

linux

The input utility requires a file. But I have a string at my disposal.
Are there better approaches to the problem than:

1. create a temporary file (mktemp for example)
   
2. write a string to it
   
3. transfer file to utility
   
4. delete a file
   

Answer 1

Pass "-" as the file name. This is a standard input-output file into which you can push your line through, for example, echo "string" |