The command:
echo "this is some text" | shellscript abc def ghi

My problem:
How to capture "this is some text" so that I can process it,
I.e. capture to a file.

What I'm attemting to do is process the text echo'd into a file after writing the
parameters passed first. No problem capturing abc, def, ghi into environment
variables. I just can't get the text that's being piped to shellscript. I'm trying to
simulate mail/mailx in shellscript.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Heinz

It sounds like you're trying to use a shell script to read from stdin (this is what you must do to capture "this is some text" from the echo command.)

Try inserting this line into your shell script. This captures the text from echo "this is some text" and stores it into $TEXT

------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
TEXT=""

for foo in `cat /dev/stdin`
do
TEXT=$foo
done
echo "Captured Text: $TEXT"

-------------------------------------------

A helpful article can be found here:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.../msg01220.html

Thank you flyingpenguin. Close, but no cigars yet.

No /dev/stdin in interix (MS Win2003 Services for Unix).

Searching for equivilant. At least now I have something to search for.

heinz

The first command in the script must do something with the piped input. So maybe use something like this....

That did it Ygor.

I could've sworn I tried that early in the game, but guess not.

Thank you very much.

Something like this would work

Jerardfjay

Yes, that would work, but not in may case as I can't change the command structure itself. I had to replace mailx as for some reason it broke and I found it easier to replace it than to dig into why it broke. That will be done some other time when we can risk possible downtime.

The cat > /tmp/file.txt did the trick. I'm still shaking my head as to what I did (or didn't) do right initially as I knew that should work. Maybe I didn't have it in as first command. Anyways, don't care as I have it working now :-)

In case you're wondering, I found eemailer that runs as a service on Win2003 Server so I replaced mailx with my own, I.e. the script, which just builds the mail message and deposits it into the directory eemailer watches. Unix (interix) on Win Server is turning out to be a good platform for us (knock on wood).

Thanks again everyone, especially Ygor who had the winner :-)