How does "cat << EOF" work in bash?

2018-06-20 04:06:10

I needed to write a script to enter multi-line input to a program ( psql ).

After a bit of googling, I found the following syntax works:

cat << EOF | psql ---params
BEGIN;

`pg_dump ----something`

update table .... statement ...;

END;
EOF

This correctly constructs the multi-line string (from BEGIN; to END; , inclusive) and pipes it as an input to psql .

But I have no idea how/why it works, can some one please explain?

I'm referring mainly to cat << EOF , I know > outputs to a file, >> appends to a file, < reads input from file.

What does << exactly do?

And is there a man page for it?

This is called heredoc format to provide a string into stdin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_document#Unix_shells for more details.

From man bash :

Here Documents

This type of redirection instructs the shell to read input from the current source until a line containing only word (with no trailing blanks) is seen.

All of the lines read up to that point are then used as the standard input for a command.

The format of here-documents is:

          <<[-]word
                  here-document
          delimiter

No parameter expansion, command substitution, arithmetic expansion, or pathname expansion is performed on word . If any characters in word are quoted, the delimiter is the result of quote removal on word , and the lines in the here-document are not expanded. If word is unquoted, all lines of the here-document are subjected to parameter expansion, command substitution, and arithmetic expansion. In the latter case, the character sequence <newline> is ignored, and must be used to quote the characters , $ , and ` .

If the redirection operator is <<- , then all leading tab characters are stripped from input lines and the line containing delimiter . This allows here-documents within shell scripts to be indented in a natural fashion.

The cat <<EOF syntax is very useful when working with multi-line text in Bash, eg. when assigning multi-line string to a shell variable, file or a pipe.

Examples of `cat <<EOF` syntax usage in Bash:

1. Assign multi-line string to a shell variable

$ sql=$(cat <<EOF
SELECT foo, bar FROM db
WHERE foo='baz'
EOF
)

The $sql variable now holds the new-line characters too. You can verify with echo -e "$sql" .

2. Pass multi-line string to a file in Bash

$ cat <<EOF > print.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo $PWD
echo $PWD
EOF

The print.sh file now contains:

#!/bin/bash
echo $PWD
echo /home/user

3. Pass multi-line string to a pipe in Bash

$ cat <<EOF | grep 'b' | tee b.txt
foo
bar
baz
EOF

The b.txt file contains bar and baz lines. The same output is printed to stdout .

In your case, "EOF" is known as a "Here Tag". Basically <<Here tells the shell that you are going to enter a multiline string until the "tag" Here . You can name this tag as you want, it's often EOF or STOP .

Some rules about the Here tags:

The tag can be any string, uppercase or lowercase, though most people use uppercase by convention.

The tag will not be considered as a Here tag if there are other words in that line. In this case, it will merely be considered part of the string. The tag should be by itself on a separate line, to be considered a tag.

The tag should have no leading or trailing spaces in that line to be considered a tag. Otherwise it will be considered as part of the string.

example:

$ cat >> test <<HERE
> Hello world HERE <-- Not by itself on a separate line -> not considered end of string
> This is a test
>  HERE <-- Leading space, so not considered end of string
> and a new line
> HERE <-- Now we have the end of the string

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