Another common pattern is wanting to get the output of a command as a variable. This can be done with command substitution.
Whenever you place $( CMD ) it will execute CMD, get the output of the command and substitute it in place. For example, if you do for file in $(ls), the shell will first call ls and then iterate over those values.
A lesser known similar feature is process substitution, <( CMD ) will execute CMD and place the output in a temporary file and substitute the <() with that file’s name. This is useful when commands expect values to be passed by file instead of by STDIN. For example, diff <(ls foo) <(ls bar) will show differences between files in directories foo and bar.
# Show differences between files in foo and bar
diff <(ls foo) <(ls bar)