Bash – Pipe a command to pv but hide all the original command’s output

There's no way to peek at the content of a pipe using commonly available shell utilities, nor is there a way to read a character from the pipe then put it back. The only way to know that a pipe has data is to read a byte, and then you have to get that byte to its destination.

So do just that: read one byte; if you detect an end of file, then do what you want to do when the input is empty; if you do read a byte then fork what you want to do when the input is not empty, pipe that byte into it, and pipe the rest of the data.

first_byte=$(dd bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null | od -t o1 -A n | tr -dc 0-9)
if [ -z "$first_byte" ]; then
  # stuff to do if the input is empty
else
  {
    printf "\\$first_byte"
    cat
  } | {
    # stuff to do if the input is not empty
  }      
fi

The ifne utility from Joey Hess's moreutils runs a command if its input is not empty. It usually isn't installed by default, but it should be available or easy to build on most unix variants. If the input is empty, ifne does nothing and returns the status 0, which cannot be distinguished from the command running successfully. If you want to do something if the input is empty, you need to arrange for the command not to return 0, which can be done by having the success case return a distinguishable error status:

ifne sh -c 'do_stuff_with_input && exit 255'
case $? in
  0) echo empty;;
  255) echo success;;
  *) echo failure;;
esac

test -t 0 has nothing to do with this; it tests whether standard input is a terminal. It doesn't say anything one way or the other as to whether any input is available.

You are confusing two very different types of inputs.

1. Standard input (stdin)
2. Command line arguments

These are different, and are useful for different purposes. Some commands can take input in both ways, but they typically use them differently. Take for example the wc command:

1. Passing input by stdin:

   ls | wc -l
   

   This will count the lines in the output of ls

2. Passing input by command line arguments:

   wc -l $(ls)
   

   This will count lines in the list of files printed by ls

Completely different things.

To answer your question, it sounds like you want to capture the rate from the output of the first command, and then use the rate as a command line argument for the second command. Here's one way to do that:

rate=$(command1 | sed -ne 's/^rate..\([0-9]*\)%.*/\1/p')
command2 -t "rate was $rate"

Explanation of the sed:

• The s/pattern/replacement/ command is to replace some pattern
• The pattern means: the line must start with "rate" (^rate) followed by any two character (..), followed by 0 or more digits, followed by a %, followed by the rest of the text (.*)
• \1 in the replacement means the content of the first expression captured within \(...\), so in this case the digits before the % sign
• The -n flag of the sed command means to not print lines by default. The p at the end of the s/// command means to print the line if there was a replacement. In short, the command will print something only if there was a match.