How to echo a EOF in bash?

Question

After search it seems the ascii of EOF is -1,but how can I echo it out?

My purpose of doing this is to test whether it behaves the same as pressing ctrl-d if I just echo out EOF.

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 08 '11 at 09:10

11

There is no way to echo out an EOF. An EOF can only be generated either by reaching the end of a file or by invoking the keypress bound to the eof terminal setting (CtrlD by default) when the file being read is bound to the terminal.

answered Jun 08 '11 at 09:10

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

46,517

isn't EOF defined as -1 in stdio.h? why can't echo it out if we know its ascii value? – locale Jun 08 '11 at 09:13
So what. An int with the value of -1 (or 4294967295 if we consider the unsigned version) can't possibly be a character anyway since characters can only have a value from 0 to 255 inclusive. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jun 08 '11 at 09:15
how do you know it's an int in the first place? – locale Jun 08 '11 at 09:18
6

Because I do things like look at the fgetc(3) man page. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jun 08 '11 at 09:20

score 10 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 08 '11 at 13:53

In bash you could write exec 1>&- in order to close the file descriptor known as stdout.

As Ignacio already said, EOF is not a character, so the question how to "echo EOF" doesn't make any sense in the first place. You can echo characters (bytes) or you can close a file descriptor, but you can never echo an EOF.

How to echo a EOF in bash?

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