How would you represent EOF in bash?

Question

I'm trying to do something like ``` read -d EOF stdin for word in $stdin; do stuff; done ``` where I want to replace 'EOF' for an actual representation of the end of file character. Edit: Thanks for the answers, that was indeed what I was trying to do. I actually had a facepalm moment when I saw `stdin=$(cat)` lol Just for kicks though how would you go about matching something like a C-d (or C-v M-v etc), basically just a character combined with Control, Alt, Shift, whatever in bash?

Accepted Answer

There isn't an end-of-file character really. When you press Ctrl-d or similar characters, the terminal driver signals to the reading application that the end of file has been reached, by returning an invalid value. The same is done by the operation system, when you have reached the end of the file. This is done by using an integer instead of a byte (so you have range similar to -2^16 .. 2^16, instead of only 0..255) and returning an out-of-range value - usually `-1`. But there is no character that would represent `eof`, because its whole purpose is to be not a character. If you want to read everything from stdin, up until the end of file, try

```
stdin=$(cat)
for word in $stdin; do stuff; done
```

That will however read the whole standard input into the variable. You can get away with only allocating memory for one line using an array, and make `read` read words of a line into that array:

```
while read -r -a array; do 
    for word in "${array[@]}"; do 
        stuff;
    done
done
```

How would you represent EOF in bash?

Solution

Problem