Re: [Groff] What does 'groff <<<foo' do?

[Clarke Echols]

On 12/02/2012 12:19 PM, Dave Kemper wrote:
> > 'cat <<<foo' or 'cat <<< foo' seems to be a way of passing
> > what follows the "<<<" directly to the command, as if equivalent
> > to "echo foo | cat".
>
> Yes.  It's documented in the bash man page under "Here Strings".  I just
> learned about it from Ralph's email myself.  It's a great shortcut.

Aha!  I now recall "Here Documents" from my HP days, but they were
handled with something like <<@EOF@, as I recall.  The Korn Shell
manual from AT&T by Korn and his Bell Labs cohort uses a different
character.

I don't remember for sure, but it seems the usage was something
on the order of:

...
cat <<@EOF@ >file
Text line 1
Text line 2
EOF
...

or something similar.  Unfortunately, I don't have any of that old
stuff (from the 1980s) still around for reference.

I've never heard of "here strings" before, but it makes sense --
though a better explanation in the man page would be helpful.

Maybe there's a tuturial manual somewhere...

Indeed there are several:
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/here-docs.html

A Google search on "bash shell script here document" produces plenty
of others.

Thanks for the enlightenment.

Clarke