Using variables inside a bash heredoc
In answer to your first question, there's no parameter substitution because you've put the delimiter in quotes - the bash manual says:
The format of here-documents is:
<<[-]word here-document delimiter
No parameter expansion, command substitution, arithmetic expansion, or pathname expansion is performed on word. If any characters in word are quoted, the delimiter is the result of quote removal on word, and the lines in the here-document are not expanded. If word is unquoted, all lines of the here-document are subjected to parameter expansion, command substitution, and arithmetic expansion. [...]
If you change your first example to use <<EOF
instead of << "EOF"
you'll find that it works.
In your second example, the shell invokes sudo
only with the parameter cat
, and the redirection applies to the output of sudo cat
as the original user. It'll work if you try:
sudo sh -c "cat > /path/to/outfile" <<EOTmy text...EOT
As a late corolloary to the earlier answers here, you probably end up in situations where you want some but not all variables to be interpolated. You can solve that by using backslashes to escape dollar signs and backticks; or you can put the static text in a variable.
Name='Rich Ba$tard'dough='$$$dollars$$$'cat <<____HERE$Name, you can win a lot of $dough this week!Notice that \`backticks' need escaping if you wantliteral text, not `pwd`, just like in variables like\$HOME (current value: $HOME)____HERE
Demo: https://ideone.com/rMF2XA
Note that any of the quoting mechanisms -- \____HERE
or "____HERE"
or '____HERE'
-- will disable all variable interpolation, and turn the here-document into a piece of literal text.
A common task is to combine local variables with script which should be evaluated by a different shell, programming language, or remote host.
local=$(uname)ssh -t remote <<: echo "$local is the value from the host which ran the ssh command" # Prevent here doc from expanding locally; remote won't see backslash remote=\$(uname) # Same here echo "\$remote is the value from the host we ssh:ed to":