Here document as an argument to bash function

Question

Is it possible to pass a here document as a bash function argument, and in the function have the parameter preserved as a multi-lined variable?

Something along the following lines:

function printArgs { echo arg1="$1" echo -n arg2= cat <<EOF $2 EOF }  printArgs 17 <<EOF 18 19 EOF 

or maybe:

printArgs 17 $(cat <<EOF 18 19 EOF) 

I have a here document that I want to feed to ssh as the commands to execute, and the ssh session is called from a bash function.

Answer 1

The way to that would be possible is:

printArgs 17 "$(cat <<EOF 18 19 EOF )" 

But why would you want to use a heredoc for this? heredoc is treated as a file in the arguments so you have to (ab)use cat to get the contents of the file, why not just do something like:

print Args 17 "18 19" 

Please keep in mind that it is better to make a script on the machine you want to ssh to and run that then trying some hack like this because bash will still expand variables and such in your multiline argument.

Answer 2

If you're not using something that will absorb standard input, then you will have to supply something that does it:

$ foo () { while read -r line; do var+=$line; done; } $ foo <<EOF a b c EOF