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up vote 2 down vote favorite
1

My bash script (lets call it myscript) takes input either from stdin (pipe), or form a regular file (if filename was provided as an argument)

a) someprog | myscript

   or

b) myscript file.txt

Then, the data is processed line by line. At the moment, my code looks something like the following:

if [ -t 0 ] ; then
    while read LINE
      do
         prog_1
         prog_2
         ...
         prog_n
      done
else
    while read LINE
      do
         prog_1
         prog_2
         ...
         prog_n
      done < $1
fi

This script works fine, but there seems to be too much duplicity. I am wondering whether there is a better (more elegant) way to do it. All the steps 1 to n are the same. The only difference is whether there is a < $1 at the end or not. is there no better way to do it?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Functions are the general way to reduce code duplication. This case isn't any different. You just need to to define a function to implement your while read logic.

myfunc() {
    while read LINE
    do
        prog_1
        prog_2
        ...
        prog_n
    done
}

if [[ -t 0 ]]; then
    myfunc # read stdin passed to the script
else
    myfunc < "$1" # redirect file to stdin
fi
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up vote 2 down vote

I usually use

cat "$@" | while read line ; do
    ...
done

The only problem might be if someone calls someprog | myscript file.txt (but the same problem exists in the original code).

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up vote 1 down vote

If an argument is given, redirect stdin from it then reuse the code.

if [ -t 0 ]; then
    exec 3<&0
elif (( $# > 0 )) && [[ -r $1 ]]; then
    exec 3<"$1"
else
    echo no stdin and no file to read
    exit 1
fi

while IFS= read -r -u 3 LINE; do
     prog_1
     prog_2
     ...
     prog_n
done

exec 3<&-
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