Shell – Source (.) piped curl output

curlenvironment-variablesshell

I have a file, f, on my webserver with the following contents:

alias ll='ls -l'

I would like to (from another linux box) do the following, but I can't get the command right:

curl http://myserver/f | ?

Where the ? will read each line into the current environment. So, given the above file, this would have the same effect as doing

% alias ll='ls -l'

in the current shell process. Is this possible?

Best Answer

How about using eval "$(curl "$URL")"?

But you better be really sure you get the right URL, and the downloaded code doesn't do anything nasty.

Related Solutions

Pipe the result of a cut command to curl

Leverage command substitution, $():

curl "$(grep ... | cut -d, -f 3)"

Here $() will be substituted by the STDOUT of the command inside $() i.e. grep ... | cut -d, -f 3, as this is done by the shell first so the curl command would be finally:

curl <the_url>

Do not download file with curl if file already exists locally

Testing for the existence of a name in a directory may be done with the -e test:

if [ -e "filename" ]; then
    echo 'File already exists' >&2
    exit 1
fi

curl -o "filename" "URL"

If you don't want to terminate the script at that point:

if [ -e "filename" ]; then
    echo 'File already exists' >&2
else
    curl -o "filename" "URL"
fi

The test will be true if the name exists, regardless of whether the name is that of a regular file, directory, named pipe or other type of filesystem object.

See man test on your system.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Pipe the result of a cut command to curl

Do not download file with curl if file already exists locally

Related Question