Shell here documentsEdit

Simple form

cat <<HERE
foo
bar
baz
HERE

Output

foo
bar
baz

Indenting

This can be useful in a shell script where you want to nest the here-doc (eg. inside an if block):

cat <<-HERE
<Tab><Tab>Stuff
<Tab>HERE

Echoing to a file

cat > file.txt <<HERE
blah
blah
blah
HERE

Piping output to another command

cat <<HERE | sort
foo
bar
baz
HERE

Output

bar
baz
foo

Avoiding variable substitution

cat <<'HERE'
$PATH
HERE

Output

$PATH

See also

• Here document section from Advanced Bash Scripting Guide found at: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/here-docs.html