How can i cat a remote file to read the parameters in BASH?

linux bash fedora
user285594 picture user285594 · Jan 23, 2012 · Viewed 19.4k times · Source

How can i cat a remote file? Where it works for local file only.

#!/bin/bash
regex='url=(.*)'
# for i in $(cat /var/tmp/localfileworks.txt);
for i in $(cat http://localhost/1/downloads.txt);
do
        echo $i;
        # if [[ $i =~ $regex ]]; then
        #echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
        #fi
done

cat: http://localhost/1/downloads.txt: No such file or directory

Answer

ruakh picture ruakh · Jan 23, 2012

Instead of cat, which reads a file from the file-system, use wget -O- -q, which reads a document over HTTP and writes it to standard output:

for i in $(wget -O- -q http://localhost/1/downloads.txt)

(The -O... option means "write to the specified file", where - is standard output; the -q option means "quiet", and disables lots of logging that would otherwise go to standard error.)

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