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

[John Reinke <jmreinke@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks once again, Tom. I knew that there had to be a simple, elegant 
solution that was just beyond the edge of  my knowledge. I also 
seemed to remember that Perl had gotten the here file feature from 
somewhere else. I didn't know that it would work with any command 
that needs mulitiple lines of input, however. I'm glad you mentioned 
that tidbit.

John

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