5 thoughts on - Problems With My Simple Write Conf Files Method

• I have never used this method per se, but in general in any script if you want to preserve the $ (dollar sign) or variable name you must use a backslash to preserve it. For example change your $CONF to \$CONF.  The $CONF should then be printed into your conf file. KM

  From: Robert Moskowitz
  To: CentOS@CentOS.org Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 10:50 AM
  Subject: [CentOS] Problems with my simple write conf files method

  I have been creating conf files and similar with the following method that I picked up (I think from psotfix docs):

  cat <>/etc/aliases || exit 1
  root: youremail EOF

  See: http://medon.htt-consult.com/CentOS7-armv7.html

  But with postfixadmin I stumbled onto a problem.  The following:

  cat </usr/share/postfixadmin/config.local.php || exit 1
  
  EOF

  produces:

  cat </usr/share/postfixadmin/config.local.php || exit 1
  

  That is the ‘$CONF’ gets processed.

  What can I do to avoid this (and any other ‘gotchas’) or can someone provide an alternative?

  thanks

• Thanks that worked.

• great.

  From: Robert Moskowitz
  To: CentOS mailing list
  Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 11:40 AM
  Subject: Re: [CentOS] Problems with my simple write conf files method

  Thanks that worked.

• KMs method of escaping every $ in the here document works but a simpler method is to escape the EOF. That tells the shell not to do variable expansion in the document:

  cat <<\EOF>/usr/share/postfixadmin/config.local.php || exit 1

• Thank you. I actually had problems with changes to
  /etc/postfix/master.cf where I have things like ${sender} that do not work as \${sender}. So mass changes of $ to \$ did not always work. :)

  Do I end with ‘EOF’ or \EOF’?