I am trying to automate starting a program that has a command line interface with a here document. I want the here document to initialize the program with commands, then let it run. The problem is that after the last command is given to the program, it acts like it's still getting commands from somewhere. The program echos commands that it receives, and it's saying that it is a null character, or a string of length zero. I tried redirecting the input from a file and I get the same results. Any ideas?

#!/bin/bash

echo "starting program"

./program <<%%
o
1
l
%%

echo "done."
exit 0

You need a terminator for your here document:

cat >file <<file2 EOF
line 1
line 2 - $1
EOF

I don't follow your example - it's quite a different format than the shell script I posted. I thought the here document starts with the tag (%% in my case) and ends with the same tag. Do I need a terminator in addition to what I have?

Thanks for your help.

Hi.

I think your shell syntax is OK:
Producing:
which suggests to me that the problem lies in your program ... cheers, makyo

To make doubly certain you could use a non-here document to confirm:

# To print out arguments one per line:
> printf '%s\n' 0 1 0 1 '|'
0
1
0
1
|
> printf '%s\n' 0 1 0 1 '|' | ./yourprog


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