Question/clarification

[cadnav]

Hey, just passing by your repo and I wanted to ask how this is different from piping the output of a command into |sh

e.g.,

echo $PWD | awk '{ print "ls "$0 }'
ls /home/cadnav

echo $PWD | awk '{ print "ls "$0 }'|sh
<output of ls /home/cadnav>

[koraa]

Hi @cadnav,

its quite different; pipe_exec reads any executable binary from standard input whereas piping into sh is limited to reading shell scripts.

What you are doing above is building the shell script ls /home/cadnav; sh will execute this and look for the binary in the $PATH variable. Depending on your system, ls will probably be found inside /bin. Looks similar to pipe exec, but does something quite different and ls must be installed on the system for this to work.

Here is something that pipe_exec can do but executing a shell script can not: Downloading a binary and immediately opening it:

ssh my_sever.eu 'cat $(which ls)' | pipe_exec

I think pipe_exec would also work for shell scripts as long as the hashbang is used, but I have not checked this.

 echo $PWD | awk 'BEGIN { print("#! /bin/sh"); print(); } { print "ls "$0 }'

Please close the issue if this answers your question.

[koraa]

Please reopen if your question has not been answered.