Question

I began a project. In the instruction, it is written that we could test our program with this command line :

cat test.txt > test.py

But I have no output.
As I understood, it is supposed to give me an output.

test.txt file looks like :

1
3
4
2
5
6
7
1
1
8
9
3
4
5
1
-1

And the test.py file looks like :

for i in range(16):
    var=raw_input("type something : ")
    print var

I was excepting this command line to redirect the content of the test.txt file to the test.py file while it was running.

I have already read the documentation about the cat command.

Could you help me please ?

In other words, how the cat command is supposed to simulate the user ? I think I have to change something in my python file.

Thank in advance,
Mff

Answer 1

The problem here is that you want cat test.txt | test.py rather than >. | sends the output of one command (cat test.txt) to the input of the other (test.py) whereas > sends the output to a file (which probably means you’ve overwritten test.py with the contents of test.txt).