Bash Input/Output

Internal

• bash

Here-Docs

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/here-docs.html

Echo Multiple Lines to stdout

cat <<EOF
  blah
  ${some_var}
  $(some-command)
  blah
EOF

• It will perform variable substitution. If you don't want that, escape \${some_var}.
• `...` sequences should be escaped as shown here: \`...\` otherwise they will executed before the output is sent to stdout.
• \ will join lines. If you want "\" in the output, then you should escape it:

      ...
      blah blah \\
      ...

Echo Multiple Lines into a File

cat > /tmp/test.txt << EOF
blah
EOF

or

(cat << EOF
blah
EOF
) > /tmp/test.txt

To append:

cat >> /tmp/test.txt << EOF
blah
EOF

Iterating over Lines from a File in the Same bash Process

With for

Note that the following approach works better for small files. If the file is large, the content will be first cached in memory, and it may look like the command is irresponsive:

Iterating over Lines in the Same bash Process with for

With sed

This approach has the advantage that lines are read one by one and not buffered:

filename=...
line_count=$(wc -l ${filename}) || exit 1
line_count=${line_count% *}
line_count=$(echo ${line_count} | sed -e 's/ *//')

line_number=1

while [ ${line_number} -le ${line_count} ]; do

    local line
    line=$(sed -n ${line_number}p ${filename})

    # process line ...

    ((line_number++))
done

Read First Line from a File

head -i <file>

Read the First Line of a Command's Output

bash --version | head -n 1

Extracting a Line Specified by Its Number from a File

With head and tail

Extract line 15 (line numbers are 1-based):

cat ./test.txt | head -15 | tail -1

With sed

Print a Line Specified by Its Number with sed

echo Formatting

Bold:

echo -e "\033[1msomething bold \033[0m"

Red:

echo -e "\033[31msomething red\033[0m"

Quoted String Expansion

$'\012' # Octal value
$'\x0a' # Hexadecimal value

More details:

Quoted String Expansion

Reading from stdin

Interactively Read Input from stdin