Process substitution not working for input files with iconv

Question

Running this in bash.

As I read the man page for iconv it accepts multiple input files hence

The cat in

iconv --from-code ISO_8859-1 --to-code UTF8 <( cat <(sed  '/^KEYWORD INTERFACE/,$d' actors.list)  <(sed  '/^KEYWORD INTERFACE/,$d' actresses.list)  <(sed  '/^KEYWORD INTERFACE/,$d' directors.list)) 

should not be necessary but if I don't have it there it only data from the actors.list file appears in the output.

Answer 1

It is certainly a bug in the iconv which is distributed with glibc. The bug is triggered by providing more than one non-mmapable command line input.

The simplest workaround is to provide a single input by putting the invocations of sed into a single command substitution:

iconv --from-code ISO_8859-1 --to-code UTF8 \
      <(sed  '/^KEYWORD INTERFACE/,$d' actors.list
        sed  '/^KEYWORD INTERFACE/,$d' actresses.list
        sed  '/^KEYWORD INTERFACE/,$d' directors.list)

In this particular case, you could just use one sed command:

iconv --from-code ISO_8859-1 --to-code UTF8 \
      <(sed  '/^KEYWORD INTERFACE/,$d' \
             actors.list actresses.list directors.list)

Of course, you could also insert a redundant cat as in the OP.

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Bug reported to glibc as https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17703