I know you can essentially replace STDIN with a file by doing something like:

<command> < file.txt

Is there a way to do that with actual text? In my mind it would look something like:

<command> < 'some text to use as input in the script'

However, I can see that that might not work since, it's hard to do things like carriage returns. So similarly, if I did want carriage returns, could I do something like "some text\n some more text\n" to emulate the carriage returns.

The reason I'm asking is I want to pass passwords, and I don't like the idea of creating temporary files with the passwords in there.

1) Use here documents to pass text to stdin

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide...nd_Herestrings

2) Modern shells like bash and ksh have an ansi-c style quoting mechanism ($'foo\nbar'), which expands backslash escapes in text strings.
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes

3) Use expect to script the running of commands in place of an actual user.


But you should never, ever store passwords or other sensitive information directly inside scripts or other freely-readable files.

Thanks. That answers my question. I wasn't going to store the password in the script. I was going to accept it as input, and then reuse it a couple of different times within the script.

Thanks!