title: Command Substitution - order of evaluation in Bash
body: <p>I was trying to run this seemingly simple script which should display the functionality of the -a flag of touch: <code>diff &lt;(stat file.o) &lt;(touch -a file.o; stat file.o)</code>. The output of this command is sporadic - obviously sometimes touch gets executed after everything else has been evaluated - but in an example as: <code>diff &lt;(echo first) &lt;(echo second; echo third)</code> - the order is kept. So why doesnt the first command work aswell?</p>