Comments on: Reading Standard Input in a Bash Shell Script

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:41:27 +0000

@J from 2007: If you’re going to correct someone, at least try a little harder. You win one of the ancient Unix “Useless Use of Cat” awards.

This is more succinct and avoids a useless fork/execve of cat
./myscript.bash < sourcefile.txt

enjoy :)

Tux — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:04:49 +0000

Thank you so much. I was trying for an hour now until I found this page and finally made my script work.

cool — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:35:44 +0000

Thanks to you I was able to use my google-fu and find the answer right away.

I’m going to change my script so that if $1 is “”
# ($1 is the first argument passed to the script)
then it reads from /dev/stdin

That should let me cat up a bunch of logfiles and send them all to my parser without saving them as a file first.

firebush — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:24:45 +0000

Thanks, this was helpful.

ScottS-M — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:13:58 +0000

That’s true. I tend to be lazy and just call bash explicitly instead of using chmod and adding #!/bin/bash to the first line of the script.