Question

Is there for the bash something like perls __DATA__?
I mean the feature, that the code after __DATA__ will not be executed.

Answer 1

Shell scripts are parsed on a line-by-line basis as they execute, so you just need to ensure execution never reaches the data you want to protect. You could do this, for instance:

# Some shell code...

exit

[data (possibly binary) goes here]

To actually read this data from your script, you can use some sed magic to extract everything after the first line containing only __DATA__, then store the output of that sed in a variable. Here’s an example:

#!/bin/sh

data=$(sed '0,/^__DATA__$/d' "$0")
printf '%s\n' "$data"

exit

__DATA__
FOO BAR BAZ
LLAMA DUCK COW

If you save this script as test-data.sh and make it executable, you can run it and get the following output:

$ ./test-data.sh
FOO BAR BAZ
LLAMA DUCK COW