How do you tell the name of a file in a pipeline ?

[JohnLynn]

If you pipe one command to a shell script:
cat test.file | MY_PRINTFILTER.SH

How do you tell the name of the file being piped to you?

I understand that in "MY_PRINTFILTER.SH test.file" this is $1.

Thanks
John

 

[grega]

At a guess, if your "cat" a file and then pipe it to a script, then you're not really passing a file (in the true sense) ... you're piping STDOUT to the script.

Greg.

 

[dchoulette]

I agree with Greg.

You can do something like that.

cat test.file | PIPESRCFILE=test.file MY_PRINTFILTER.SH

Then in your script:

inputfile=${PIPESRCFILE:-$1}

This way

$inputfile

is

$PIPESRCFILE

if that variable exists, else it is

$1

so that you can still use

MY_PRINTFILTER.SH test.file