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I saw the following command:

sudo tee /etc/docker/daemon.json <<-'EOF' { "registry-mirrors": ["https://xxxxxxxx.mirror.aliyuncs.com"] } EOF

What is the hyphen (‐) used for? It works fine even i remove the hyphen.

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  • It will cause it to strip leading tabs (and only tabs, not spaces!) from each line from the here-document, and also recognize the delimiter (EOF) if preceded by tabs. Commented Jul 15, 2019 at 8:00

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The hyphen/dash is used for telling the shell to remove any leading tab character from the here-document. This is documented by POSIX as part of the here-document redirection:

If the redirection operator is <<-, all leading <tab> characters shall be stripped from input lines and the line containing the trailing delimiter. [...]

The feature allows for creating slightly prettier scripts:

while some-condition; do some-command <<-END_INPUT some data goes here END_INPUT done

(where each line in the here-document and the line containing the END_INPUT delimiter are indented using tabs), as opposed to

while some-condition; do some-command <<END_INPUT some data goes here END_INPUT done
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