Stylized line drawing of mark playing the flute

Bash while-read loop breaking early

I've been working on a script which loops over a list of sites and runs a java program on each site name.

The basic script looked like this:

cat /list/of/sites | while read s
do
    java -jar thing.jar $s
done

The problem was the while loop would break after the first execution.

After some digging, I found this Stackoverflow post which talked about how some commands hijack STDIN which messes up a while-read loop like the above. In that specific case, they were using ssh so and ssh -n took care of it.

In my case, we needed to rewrite the while loop like this:

while read s
do
    echo "" | java -jar thing.jar $s
done < /list/of/sites

The combination of reading the file at the end of the loop and the empty echo takes care of it.