Reading everything stdin in a bash script

January 22, 2013

In trying to get a collectd instance to send me alerts, I found out that I didn’t know how to just read everything that might be piped into a bash script via standard input. You can read line by line easily using the read command. Just looping over it seemed pretty horrendous to me until I discovered an elegant way to do it that’s perhaps canonical, but doesn’t seem to pop up via quick googling:

#!/bin/bash

VALUE=$(cat)

echo "$VALUE"

That’s it! $(cat) is a shorthand for $(cat /dev/stdin), so presumably you can use this to read from stderr by pointing it at /dev/stderr.

Happy piping!