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A comment on For the Love of Pipes. Parent comment

Re:For the Love of Pipes by toxik on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @08:43AM (#18968151)
I think it's also a grammatical wart of shell syntax. Things going into a command are usually on the left, but piping in a file goes on the right.
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Re:For the Love of Pipes by richardwhiuk on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @08:56AM (#18968235) 

   <file command | command | command
is perfectly fine.
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Re:For the Love of Pipes by nine_k on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @09:12AM (#18968323)
The arrow now points backwards.
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Re:For the Love of Pipes by chrisfinazzo on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @10:22AM (#18968847)
Of course, if any of your commands prompt for input, you'll be disappointed that's not always as easy as it appears on the surface.

Does anyone have a better way to do this kind of thing?

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Re:For the Love of Pipes by milkey_mouse on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @03:27PM (#18972108)
The standard is expect [1]. There are also libraries for many programming languages which perform a similar task, such as pexpect [2].

[1] https://core.tcl.tk/expect/index [2] https://pexpect.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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Re:For the Love of Pipes by richardwhiuk on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @04:38PM (#18972803)
The better solution is to change the command so it expects programatic arguments / pass command line parameters.

i.e.

prefer `apt-get install -y` over `yes | apt-get install foo`

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