bash: what is the difference between "done < foo", "done << foo" and "done <<< foo" when closing a loop? - bash

Question

In a bash script, I see several while statements with those redirect signs when closing the loop.
I know that if I end it with "done < file", I am redirecting the file to the stdin of the command in the while statement. But what the others means?
I would appreciate if someone could give an explanation with examples.

Answer 1

With the file text.txt
1aa
2bb
3cc
Redirection:
$ cat < text.txt
1aa
2bb
3cc
Here document:
$ cat << EOF
> 1AA
> 2BB
> EOF
1AA
2BB
Here string:
$ cat <<< 1aaa
1aaa

Answer 2

The first form, <, is an input redirection. It somewhat different than << and <<< which are two variants of a here document.
The first form, <, is primarily used to redirect the contents of a file to a command or process. It is a named FIFO, and therefor a file that is passed to a command that accepts file arguments.
cmd < file
will open the file named file and create a new file name to open and read. The difference between cmd file and cmd < file is the name passed to cmd in the second case is the name of a named pipe.
You can also do process substitution:
cmd <(process)
An example use would be comparing two directories:
diff <(ls dir1) <(ls dir2)
In this case, the command ls dir1 and ls dir2 has output redirected to a file like stream that is then read by diff as if those were two files.
You can see the name of the file device by passing to echo a process substitution:
$ echo <(ls)
/dev/fd/63
Since echo does not support opening files, it just prints the name of the FIFO.
Here documents are easier to demonstrate. The << form has a 'limit string' that is not included in the output:
$ cat <<HERE
> line 1
> line 2
> line 3
> HERE
line 1
line 2
line 3
The HERE is a unique string that must be on its own line.
The 'here string' or <<< form does not require the delimiting string of the << form and is on a single line:
$ cat <<< 'line 1'
line 1
You can also expand parameters:
$ v="some text"
$ cat <<< "$v"
some text
But not other forms of shell expansions:
Brace expansion:
$ echo a{b,c,d}e
abe ace ade
$ cat <<< a{b,c,d}e
a{b,c,d}e
Given a 'generic' Bash while loop that reads input line by line:
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done
There are several ways that you can feed input into that loop.
First example, you can redirect a file. For demo, create a 6 line file:
$ seq 6 > /tmp/6.txt
Redirect the input of the file into the loop:
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done </tmp/6.txt
'1'
'2'
'3'
'4'
'5'
'6'
Or, second example, you can directly read from the output of seq using redirection:
$ while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done < <(seq 3)
'1'
'2'
'3'
(Please note the extra < with a space for this form)
Or, third example, you can use a 'HERE' doc separated by CR:
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done <<HERE
1
2 3
4
HERE
'1 '
'2 3'
' 4'
Going back to diff which will only work on files, you can use process substitution and a HERE doc or process substitution and redirection to use diff on free text or the output of a program.
Given:
$ cat /tmp/f1.txt
line 1
line 2
line 3
Normally you would need to have a second file to compare free text with that file. You can use a HERE doc and process substitution to skip creating a separate file:
$ diff /tmp/f1.txt <(cat <<HERE
line 1
line 2
line 5
HERE
)
3c3
< line 3
---
> line 5

Answer 3

command < foo
Redirect the file foo to the standard input of command.
command << foo
blah 1
blah 2
foo
Here document: send the following lines up to foo to the standard input of command.
command <<< foo
Here-string. The string foo is sent to the standard input of command.