Display an XML doc from the command line

Leading me down the garden path today, how to quickly display an XML document … graphically, from the command line?

This doesn’t work:

$ virt-inspector --xml RHEL54.img | firefox -

Creating a temporary file is possible, but ugly.

Then I was tipped off that you can create and pass a data: URI to Firefox.

There is no existing command line tool to generate data URIs, but we can write one in 3 lines of shell script:

#!/bin/sh -
echo -n data:$1\;
uuencode -m notused | tail -n +2 | tr -d '\n'

Example:

$ cat > /tmp/test.html
<b>Hello,</b>
<i>world!</i>
$ datauri text/html < /tmp/test.html
data:text/html;PGI+SGVsbG8sPC9iPgo8aT53b3JsZCE8L2k+Cg======

This also doesn’t work. There are two problems: the XML generated by virt-inspector is too long for a data URI, and in any case Firefox seems to ignore the data URI although I’m sure I’m constructing it correctly. Maybe it’s a security or configuration issue?

Well, good idea, but let’s go back to the temporary file idea. Bash process substitution might have worked:

$ firefox <(virt-inspector --xml RHEL54.img)

but Firefox’s frankly stupid session management crap gets in the way because this command expands to something like:

$ firefox /proc/self/fd/123

and the new firefox process passes the non-portable /proc/self path to the currently running instance of Firefox which doesn’t have the same view of /proc/self.

So we are finally left with:

$ firefox $(f=`mktemp -u`;
            virt-inspector --xml RHEL54.img > $f.xml;
            echo $f.xml)

which is fugly and unsafe.

If only there was a less insane tool to display XML, but being XML I guess insane goes with the territory.