I want to send a heredoc command like this one
cat <<EOF line 1 line 2 EOF to background. (The actual command is openssl with many lines of input which takes some time to complete).
The command needs to be storable in string so that I could exec it in PHP.
Simply appending an ampersand doesn't work:
cat <<EOF line 1 line 2 EOF & Any other combinations I tried (putting the command in brackets etc.) don't work either.
How?
The here-doc operator (<<EOF, here) is just a regular redirection operator, and what comes after it (on the same line!) is still part of the command.
E.g.
# from here-doc to file cat <<EOF > foo.txt ... EOF # here-doc and some arguments to cat cat <<EOF -n foo.txt ... EOF # two here-docs! cat /dev/fd/3 /dev/fd/4 3<<EOF 4<<EOF first EOF second EOF So you'd do the same as if it was just a redirection from a file, put the & at the end of the cat command line:
cat <<EOF & here-doc text EOF 
cmd1 << EOF | cmd2 3<< EOF2 & if grep -q word <<EOF; then with the here-doc data next, and the rest of the compound command coming after it.