Best method to convert file to output on stdout

I'm trying to use Abiword along with Swish-e to automatically index .doc
files uploaded to a FreeBSD 6.3 web site. To set up a "filter" for .doc
files, I need to specify a command line that will emit the HTML on stdout.

I believe that I have found a method to do this by setting the
--to-file=|cat option (the "filename" is actually pipe to the cat utility),
but as this seems a bit kludgy, I thought I'd check whether there was a
better way to have abiword just out its conversion directly rather than
creating files.

Under Windows, I was able to get --to-file=|type to work. But on the actual
FreeBSD server, I'm getting this unwelcome behavior:

$ abiword --help
Error on option --help: unknown option.
Run 'abiword --help' to see a full list of available command line options.
$ abiword -?
Error on option -?: unknown option.
Run 'abiword --help' to see a full list of available command line options.

Has anyone seen this before? I even did a "portupgrade -f -R abiword" to
make sure it had current versions of all its dependencies.

Despite that I can get abiword to translate a file with a specified name.
But I really would like to pipe it to stdout rather than write a program to
pick a tmp file, run abiword, output the tmp file, and delete the tmp
file...

Thanks,

Dave

--
David H. Brown
dave@davidhbrown.us
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