What does "< <(command args)" mean in the shell?

<() is called process substitution in the manual, and is similar to a pipe but passes an argument of the form /dev/fd/63 instead of using stdin.

< reads the input from a file named on command line.

Together, these two operators function exactly like a pipe, so it could be rewritten as

find /bar -name *foo* -print0 | while read line; do  ...done

<( command ) is process substitution. Basically, it creates a special type of file called a "named pipe," then redirects the output of the command to be the named pipe. So for example, suppose you want to page through a list of files in an extra-big directory. You could do this:

ls /usr/bin | more

Or this:

more <( ls /usr/bin )

But NOT this:

more $( ls /usr/bin )

The reason for this becomes clear when you investigate further:

~$ echo $( ls /tmp )gedit.maxtothemax.436748151 keyring-e0fuHW mintUpdate orbit-gdm orbit-maxtothemax plugtmp pulse-DE9F3Ei96ibD pulse-PKdhtXMmr18n ssh-wKHyBU1713 virtual-maxtothemax.yeF3Jo~$ echo <( ls /tmp )/dev/fd/63~$ cat <( ls /tmp )gedit.maxtothemax.436748151keyring-e0fuHWmintUpdateorbit-gdmorbit-maxtothemaxplugtmppulse-DE9F3Ei96ibDpulse-PKdhtXMmr18nssh-wKHyBU1713virtual-maxtothemax.yeF3Jo

/dev/fd/whatever acts like a text file with the output of the command between the parenthesis.

< redirects to stdin.

<() seems to be some sort of a reverse pipe, as mentioned on the page:

find /bar -name *foo* -print0 | \while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' file; do  dosomethingwith "$file"        # do something with each filedone

will not work, because the while loop will be executed in a subshell, and you'll lose changes made in the loop