Question

What I want to do is the following:

1. read in multiple line input from stdin into variable A
2. make various operations on A
3. pipe A without losing delimiter symbols (\n,\r,\t,etc) to another command

The current problem is that, I can’t read it in with read command, because it stops reading at newline.

I can read stdin with cat, like this:

my_var=`cat /dev/stdin` 

, but then I don’t know how to print it. So that the newline, tab, and other delimiters are still there.

My sample script looks like this:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash  A=`cat /dev/stdin`  if [ ${#A} -eq 0 ]; then         exit 0 else         cat ${A} | /usr/local/sbin/nextcommand fi 

Answer 1

This is working for me:

myvar=`cat`  echo '$myvar' 

The quotes around $myvar are important.