Re: Re: easy way to read from stdin ?

[Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu>]

On Tue, Jun 23, 1998 at 03:01:45PM -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Jun 23,  4:37pm, Sweth Chandramouli wrote:
> } Subject: easy way to read from stdin ?
> }
> } 	this is probably just going to show my colossal cluelessness, but is 
> } there an easy way to get a zsh script to read from standard input?
> 
> It should be reading everything except the commands themselves from the
> standard input "by default."  However, I'm puzzled when you say:
> 
> } ... rather than reading input from a file ...
> 
> What is it that you are doing to cause it to read from a file?  That is,
> when it's not a cgi, how do you run it?
	i put a "< filename" after the while read loop, so that it would
read input from the file "filename".  basically, i'm trying to create a
mailto form here--it should take the values from the form in question,
do some processing on them, return a web page indicating success or
failure, and mail the results off to someone using mailx.  the processing
i was trying to do is the same as what i was doing elsewhere using an
already-existing script, so i figured that if i could just cut&paste
that script into my new cgi form, and remove the redirection of stdin
from a file, everything would work fine.  it _does_ work fine from the
command line (e.g. "echo 'testing' | myscript.cgi" does what i expect),
but when i run it as a form, it acts as though it is getting no input.
	i do know that the input is, in fact, getting through to the
script, however, because i tried replacing my script with a little perl
snippet i found elsewhere that basically pumps stdin into a variable and
then prints it to screen, and that worked fine.  i don't really have the
time or patience right now to do what i should do, and actually learn
perl, so i was hoping that there was some subtle point about stdin for
a shell script that i was missing.
	if no one else has any ideas, i'll probably wander over to the
perl newsgroups and see if anyone can explain exactly what that perl
snippet that i stole is doing, to see if maybe i'm not understanding
it correctly.  (i should probably do that regardless, i guess...)

	-- sweth.

-- 
Sweth Chandramouli
IS Coordinator, The George Washington University
<sweth@gwu.edu> / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F)
<a href="http://astaroth.nit.gwu.edu/~sweth/disc.html">*</a>