I know that sh just calls the default shell, so "bash -" means the same. But can someone explain the syntax to me. I tried looking in the bash manual, but couldn't find it. I came across this because I wanted to execute the output of a command. Ex.
echo date | sh - prints out the date.
Yes, sh - and bash - do mean the same.
In man bash, there is this description (emphasis mine):
--
A -- signals the end of options and disables further option processing. Any arguments after the -- are treated as filenames and arguments. An argument of - is equivalent to --
That simply means that it signals the end of options and that any following tokens are arguments (not options) even if they start with a dash -.
And a POSIX sh has a similar description.
Thus, this volume of POSIX.1-2017 allows the single to mark the end of the options, in addition to the use of the regular "--" argument, because it was considered that the older practice was so pervasive.
This command:
$ echo "date" | sh - Mon Feb 12 00:00:00 UTC 2018 But also does this:
$ echo "date" | sh Mon Feb 12 00:00:00 UTC 2018 And this
$ echo "date" | sh -s Mon Feb 12 00:00:00 UTC 2018 This will make clear what is being executed:
$ echo "date" | sh -x + date Mon Feb 12 00:00:00 UTC 2018 But this will fail:
$ echo "date" | sh - -x sh: 0: Can't open -x That means that the date string is being read as a command from the standard input and that the dash (-) signals the end of options and start the arguments (the same as -- would do).
echo date|xargs should print the word date to stdout. Of course in this case, you could simply write echo date, but redundantly piping it to xargs still should not cause any problem. What error message do you get? - is equivalent to a (first only) --. Any further - or -- are treated as normal arguments not having special meaning. Well, actually, naming files for the shell.
-as a marker to read from stdin. As you can see from the (unfortunately downvoted) answer here the-can mean different things to different shells. Forbashit's a synonym for--and not a stdin marker. For at least one other shell it appears to be undefined.