Bdtjtk

I have the following shell script. The purpose is to loop thru each line of the target file (whose path is the input parameter to the script) and do work against each line. Now, it seems only work with the very first line in the target file and stops after that line got processed. Is there anything wrong with my script?

#!/bin/bash

# SCRIPT: do.sh

# PURPOSE: loop thru the targets 



FILENAME=$1

count=0



echo "proceed with $FILENAME"



while read LINE; do

   let count++

   echo "$count $LINE"

   sh ./do_work.sh $LINE

done < $FILENAME



echo "ntotal $count targets"

In do_work.sh, I run a couple of ssh commands.

The problem is that do_work.sh runs ssh commands and by default ssh reads from stdin which is your input file. As a result, you only see the first line processed, because ssh consumes the rest of the file and your while loop terminates.

To prevent this, pass the -n option to your ssh command to make it read from /dev/null instead of stdin.

ssh -n option prevents checking the exit status of ssh when using HEREdoc while piping output to another program.
So use of /dev/null as stdin is preferred.

#!/bin/bash

while read ONELINE ; do

   ssh ubuntu@host_xyz </dev/null <<EOF 2>&1 | filter_pgm 

   echo "Hi, $ONELINE. You come here often?"

   process_response_pgm 

EOF

   if [ ${PIPESTATUS[0]} -ne 0 ] ; then

      echo "aborting loop"

      exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}

   fi

done << input_list.txt

More generally, a workaround which isn't specific to ssh is to redirect standard input for any command which might otherwise consume the while loop's input.

while read LINE; do

   let count++

   echo "$count $LINE"

   sh ./do_work.sh "$LINE" </dev/null

done < "$FILENAME"

The addition of </dev/null is the crucial point here (though the corrected quoting is also somewhat important; see also When to wrap quotes around a shell variable?).

Another workaround of sorts which is somewhat specific to ssh is to make sure any ssh command has its standard input tied up, e.g. by changing

ssh otherhost some commands here

to instead read the commands from a here document, which conveniently (for this particular scenario) ties up the standard input of ssh for the commands:

ssh otherhost <<'____HERE'

    some commands here

____HERE