7

It's nice to copy-paste a series of Bash commands that you find on a website. But depending on the commands, sometimes you lose a few. Maybe they get swallowed up by programs that read from standard input, or perhaps there's another explanation.

So I end up doing this sometimes:

$ bash <<EOF
cmd2
...
EOF

Is there a better way? Some Bash option? An SSH option? (My setup is an Bash running on an Ubuntu server, which I'm SSH'ed to from a standard OS X terminal. Not sure how much of that is relevant.)

EDIT

Example

In response to requests for a concrete example, here's one. I pasted the following four lines into an SSH shell (from my Snow Leopard desktop) connected to a stock Ubuntu Quantal running on an OpenStack VM, in the Bash shell.

sudo apt-get install -y r-base gdebi-core
sudo apt-get install -y libapparmor1 # Required only for Ubuntu, not Debian
wget http://download2.rstudio.org/rstudio-server-0.97.314-amd64.deb
sudo gdebi rstudio-server-0.97.314-amd64.deb

The first two commands executed (successfully), while the last two were apparently never received by the server (or at least, never processed by Bash).

Improve this question
13
  • 1
    Do you have a specific example of what fails? Commented May 13, 2013 at 6:57
  • No. Usually a long-running command, like apt-get update, git clone, wget etc. Commented May 13, 2013 at 8:00
  • 2
    Problem: need a convenient, robust mechanism for pasting a series of commands into a shell then executing them, that doesn't rely on the vagaries of the terminal itself. Commented May 13, 2013 at 8:05
  • 1
    OT here, but interesting nevertheless. At least I was really surprised, that you sometimes don't get what you expect with copy&paste from websites: h-online.com/open/news/item/… Commented May 13, 2013 at 16:50
  • 2
    This reads like game of "Find me a rock"("No, that one's too big."; "No, that one's too small."; "Not that one, I don't like the color.") A more explicit problem description might get you fewer guesses and some more relevant answers you'd like better. Commented May 13, 2013 at 17:32

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
5

A quick and dirty solution is to run this:

bash -c '<paste commands here>'

This works even if the paste contains newline characters. It may fail if the paste contains single quotes. If you're aware of the bash quoting rules, you should be able to modify this method for the specific commands that you're trying to run.

Improve this answer
1
  • That's excellent - I had no idea you could put newlines in command lines. Commented May 15, 2013 at 7:15
6

You could also use something like pbpaste | bash. And edit-and-execute-command (\C-x\C-e) also works with multiple commands.

If some commands require root permissions, you can use sudo -v to validate the timestamp for 5 minutes.

Improve this answer
6
  • The OP is SSHing into an Ubuntu server, so pbpasteing into bash is not easily doable there. Commented May 13, 2013 at 8:02
  • 3
    Ah, that edit-current-line trick works. (Ctrl-x, Ctrl-E or ^X^E in other notation). Commented May 13, 2013 at 8:03
  • It is quite a few keystrokes all up.: Ctrl+X, Ctrl+E, Cmd-V, Ctrl+X, Y, <enter> Commented May 13, 2013 at 8:06
  • xsel on Linux. Commented Aug 25, 2015 at 7:58
  • @SteveBennett looks like your $VISUAL editor is nano ;) the keystrokes are different for other editors Commented Jun 29, 2018 at 7:43
1

I make such cuts and pastes into my favourite text editor, named appropriately, where I can then carefully look for extraneous characters, and ensure that I'll be running what I expect to be running. I'm strongly adverse to cutting and pasting code snippets into an interactive shell: who knows what extra commands might be picked up by the cut & paste operation?

Once your text file has the verified commands saved, they can then be executed with the built-in command

source <filename>

Improve this answer
5
  • Ok, and once you've satisfied yourself that the contents of the clipboard is precisely what you want to run? Commented May 13, 2013 at 8:00
  • Original updated; On the saved file, use 'source <filename>' to execute the statements within, without having to make it executable. Commented May 13, 2013 at 9:41
  • And now you have a script file lying around which you'll never run again. That's pretty clumsy. Commented May 13, 2013 at 9:53
  • then you delete it and it won't be around anymore. Commented May 13, 2013 at 10:06
  • 1
    Yep. Way clumsier than the original <<EOF method. Commented May 15, 2013 at 7:14

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.