Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi - i have an unix application which receives user input and prints certain details. the problem is i am trying to automate it and i don't know how to pass a list of commands to the application using shell script. here documents don't work as well - if i use the here document when i am opening the application like

myapp << here1.txt

i receive an error because the myapp doesn't expect any user input until it fully opens. I hope i am clear

i want to be able to pass commands like tab tab and then some text to the application.

Here documents look like this - with an example delimiter of "EOF"

Code:

./myapp << EOF
\t\tsomething
EOF

Not like what you showed. A here doc becomes terminal input, emulating a user letting the program run, then answering questions.

yeah sry i was just being lazy there..

Code:

myapp << end
/t
/something
end

this doesn't work because myapp doesn't expect any input - it throws an error when i try to do that, saying: invalid input.. is there any other way to pass commands to myapp.

If i could pass commands to myapp via a here document after the program runs - then it would be a perfect solution.. is there any way to do it?

It'd help a lot to know what "myapp" actually was and what you were attempting to accomplish in it. If it really accepts input that way you could try

Code:

( sleep 5 ; echo "/t" ; echo "/something" ) | myapp

...but this won't work if it expects stdin to be a terminal.