[linux-help] Re: multi-line output from Bourne shell

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Reinke wrote:
> 
> What would be the best way in the Bourne shell (not bash!) to do the
> equivelant of Perl's 'print <<END_OF_TEXT;'?
> 
> I need to generate a file from a Bourne shell script, and there are
> several large portions of the file that will be the same every time. It
> wouldn't be feasible to 'echo "one line of text" >> output_file' for every
> line in the file. Also, the script probably won't have access to other
> files, so appending the contents of separate existing files won't work.

cat <<EOF
Type in all the
text you want, as 
many lines as you want,
plus you can expand $Variables
and even run `date`, pretty
much anything you can do in ""
except having to escape \",
until you hit a line with 
nothing but EOF on it
EOF

If you want to pipe this file, add the pipe commands after the <<EOF
(EOF is convention, anything will do), e.g.:

cat <<EOF | tr a-z A-Z
hello world
goodbye world
EOF

cat just copies stdin to stdout; use any other program that reads stdin
to whatever effect you're looking for.

> Thanks,
> John

-- 
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 *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.tomhull.com/
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