Shell Programming and Scripting

Its called command-substitution (a feature of KSH).
Instead of typing the whole script on the command line, you just put it in a file and then use command-substitution to send all the commands as an argument to ssh instead of redirecting stdin.
This way your stdin is still linked to your terminal and you can send input to the script.

So, this:

Code:

ssh user@hostname 'echo "type var";read var;echo $var'

And this, are effectively same:

Code:

> cat hours.sh
echo "type var";
read var;
echo $var;

> ssh user@hotsname "$(cat hours.sh)"

I understand the command-substitution construct $(), but was thrown by the "cat". It makes perfect sense now that I've had a chance to think about it. I was not connecting execution of the script remotely with "cat"ting the script locally using command-substitution. I was thinking in terms of esoteric features of ssh rather than a common feature of bash.

Thanks for your time!

Bub