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pipeshstdin

Optional pipping to shell script

I want to get the content of stdin in a variable only if something was pipped to the script, the code I'm using is:

input=$(cat)
echo "$@ $input"

Doing echo 'something' | ./script works as expected, but not pipping anything just makes the script waiting indefinitely for input. How do I ignore empty stdin?

Solution

  • Testing if something was passed to stdin like this before trying to set a variable seems to solve the problem:

    if ! [ -t 0 ]; then
    input=$(cat)
fi