I'd like to (ab)use git's nice diff interface and make this work: git --no-pager diff --no-index <(echo foo) <(echo bar) It just prints: -pipe:[203030063] +pipe:[203030065] But I want: $ diff -u0 <(echo foo) <(echo bar)|tail -n 2 -foo +bar I went diving through the diff code for a bit, but couldn't find where it's stat()-ing the two files and deciding it's not going to follow symlinks. Just having some option to follow symlinks would make this work.