[GLLUG] Shell scripting weirdness

[Alain Williams]

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 10:11:52PM +0100, Robert McKay wrote:
> Greetings fellow Lugites,
> 
> I was wondering if anyone knows why these two commands behave
> differently;
> 
> bash -c "cat & wait"
> bash -c "cat <&0 & wait"
> 
> The first just exits right away. The second one does what I
> wanted/expected the first one to do.

Running something in background causes its stdin to be connected to /dev/null.
Thus:

1) cat gets EOF immediately

2) cat has its stdin *reconnected* to bash's stdin and thus reads whatever before
   getting EOF

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
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