reading multiple items semi-interactively from the user in bash

Question

I'm trying to read multiple items from the user in a shell script, with no luck. The intention is to read a list of files first (which are read from the stdin pipe), and then read twice more to get two strings interactively. What I'm trying to do is read a list of files to attach in an email, then the subject and finally the email body.

So far I have this:

photos=($(< /dev/stdin))

echo "Enter message subject"
subject=$(< /dev/stdin)

echo "Enter message body"
body=$(< /dev/stdin)

(plus error checking code that I omit for succintness)

However, this gets an empty subject and body presumably because the second and third redirections get EOF.

I've been trying to close and reopen stdin with <&- and stuff but it doesn't seem to work that way.

I even tried using a separator for the list of files, using a "while; read line" loop and break out of the loop when the separator was detected. But that didn't work either (??).

Any ideas how to build something like this?

Answer 1

So what I ended up doing is based on ezpz's answer and this doc: http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/io-redirection.html Basically I prompt for the fields first from /dev/tty, and then read stdin, using the dup-and-close trick:

# close stdin after dup'ing it to FD 6
exec 6<&0

# open /dev/tty as stdin
exec 0</dev/tty

# now read the fields
echo "Enter message subject"
read subject
echo "Enter message body"
read body

# done reading interactively; now read from the pipe
exec 0<&6 6<&-
photos=($(< /dev/stdin))

Thanks!