Say I have a file at the URL "http://mywebsite.com/myscript.txt" that contains a script:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Hello, world!"
read -p "What is your name? " name
echo "Hello, ${name}!"
And I'd like to run this script without first saving it to a file. How do I do this?
Now, I've seen the syntax:
bash < <(curl -s http://mywebsite.com/myscript.txt)
But this doesn't seem to work like it would if I saved to a file and then executed. For example readline doesn't work, and the output is just:
$ bash < <(curl -s http://mywebsite.com/myscript.txt)
Hello, world!
Similarly, I've tried:
curl -s http://mywebsite.com/myscript.txt | bash -s --
With the same results.
Originally I had a solution like:
timestamp=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
curl -s http://mywebsite.com/myscript.txt -o /tmp/.myscript.${timestamp}.tmp
bash /tmp/.myscript.${timestamp}.tmp
rm -f /tmp/.myscript.${timestamp}.tmp
But this seems sloppy, and I'd like a more elegant solution.
I'm aware of the security issues regarding running a shell script from a URL, but let's ignore all of that for right now.
Answer
source <(curl -s http://mywebsite.com/myscript.txt)
ought to do it. Alternately, leave off the initial redirection on yours, which is redirecting standard input; bash takes a filename to execute just fine without redirection, and <(command) syntax provides a path.
bash <(curl -s http://mywebsite.com/myscript.txt)
It may be clearer if you look at the output of echo <(cat /dev/null)