Android Shell EOF

Question

I have a small problem with a script that I am making for Android. I can't seam to get 'EOF' to work in 'mksh'. It is working fine in 'sh' and 'bash', but since 'mksh' is becomming the most used in Android I really need for it to work in all.

cat <<EOF
  ... lines here ...
EOF

This example will cause the fallowing error

can't create temporary file /sqlite_stmt_journals/mksh.(random): No such file or directory

I have seen others with this issue, but no real solution.

Answer 1

The problem comes from that /sqlite_stmt_journals used to exist and be a world-writable sticky directory, like /tmp is in normal Unix boxen, so I used it as standard TMPDIR when I added mksh to Android.

Recent Android security policy forbids world-writable directories, totally.

We (the Android team and I) are aware of the problem but have yet to come up with a good solution; “user” home directories would need to be created before they can be (automatically) used, but a Googler told me they have something in the queue.

Until then, set TMPDIR to something that is writable for your user.

This is a problem with the Android environment, not with mksh per se.

@Julian Fondren: your Android device is probably from when that directory still existed.

In AOSP git master, the default TMPDIR is /data/local which is writable at least for the root user… so, just set it to something writable for you (and export it if you’re running scripts) for now.

Answer 2

Well, there's this obvious if unpleasant solution: don't use HERE docs; just echo each line to a temporary file. So your example becomes:

echo ... first line ... > $tmpfile
echo ... subsequent lines ... >> $tmpfile
cat $tmpfile
rm $tmpfile

EDIT: wait, what? Sure looks like HERE docs work just fine on mksh to me. The following occurs with mksh R39 on a stock Kindle Fire HD (don't mind the perl):

$ perl <<FOO
print "hi\n"
FOO
hi
$ 

Your example also works as I'd expect.