Multiline syntax for piping a heredoc; is this portable?

Question

I\'m familiar with this syntax:

cmd1 << EOF | cmd2
text
EOF

but just discovered that bash allows me to write:

cmd1 &         


        

Answer 1

Hmm, I suppose yes, according to the test in bash in POSIX mode:

$ bash --posix
$ cat <<EOF |
> ahoj
> nazdar
> EOF
> sed 's/a/b/'
bhoj
nbzdar

Answer 2

Yes, the POSIX standard allows this. According to the 2008 version:

The here-document shall be treated as a single word that begins after the next <newline> and continues until there is a line containing only the delimiter and a <newline>, with no <blank> characters in between. Then the next here-document starts, if there is one.

And includes this example of multiple "here-documents" in the same line:

cat <<eof1; cat <<eof2
Hi,
eof1
Helene.
eof2

So there is no problem doing redirections or pipes. Your example is similar to something like this:

cat file |
cmd

And the shell grammar (further down on the linked page) includes these definitions:

pipe_sequence    :                             command
                 | pipe_sequence '|' linebreak command

newline_list     :              NEWLINE
                 | newline_list NEWLINE
                 ;
linebreak        : newline_list
                 | /* empty */

So a pipe symbol can be followed by an end-of-line and still be considered part of a pipeline.

Answer 3

Yes it's in the POSIX shell grammar. You can also have more than one here-doc for the same command (some other examples use two cat invocations, but this works as well):

cat <<EOF1 <<EOF2
first here-doc
EOF1
second here-doc
EOF2

This is contrived (using 2 here-docs for stdin), but if you think of providing input for different file descriptors it immediately makes sense.

There's also the possibility to drop the cat entirely. Why not make the here-document directly available to cmd:

cmd << EOF
input
here
EOF

Answer 4

Hi, check this, for example

#!/bin/sh
( base32 -d | base64 -d )<<ENDOFTEXT
KNDWW42DNNSHS5ZXPJCG4MSVM5MVQVT2JFCTK3DELBFDCY2IIJYGE2JUJNHWS22LINVHQMCMNVFD
CWJQIIZVUV2JOVNEOVJLINTW6PIK
ENDOFTEXT

regards