Solaris™ 8 Advanced System Administrator's Guide, Third Edition

Input and Output

When you write shell scripts, you want to be able to obtain input from sources outside your scripts; for example, from another file or from keyboard input. You also want to be able to generate output both for use within the script and for display on-screen.

The following sections describe how to control input and output of a shell script, using standard input, output, error, and redirection; how to accept user input (input from the keyboard) to a script; how to create “here” documents; and how to generate output to the screen.

Standard In, Standard Out, and Standard Error

When writing shell scripts, you can control input/output redirection. Input redirection forces a command to read any necessary input from a file instead of ...