Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by richardwhiuk 2704 days ago

   <file command | command | command
is perfectly fine.
2 comments

The arrow now points backwards.
Of course, if any of your commands prompt for input, you'll be disappointed that's not always as easy as it appears on the surface.

Does anyone have a better way to do this kind of thing?

The standard is expect [1]. There are also libraries for many programming languages which perform a similar task, such as pexpect [2].

[1] https://core.tcl.tk/expect/index [2] https://pexpect.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

The better solution is to change the command so it expects programatic arguments / pass command line parameters.

i.e.

prefer `apt-get install -y` over `yes | apt-get install foo`