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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

I think it's also a grammatical wart of shell syntax. Things going into a command are usually on the left, but piping in a file goes on the right.

   <file command | command | command

is perfectly fine.

The arrow now points backwards.

Of course, if any of your commands prompt for input, you'll be disappointed that's not always as easy as it appears on the surface.

Does anyone have a better way to do this kind of thing?

The standard is expect [1]. There are also libraries for many programming languages which perform a similar task, such as pexpect [2].

The better solution is to change the command so it expects programatic arguments / pass command line parameters.

i.e.

prefer `apt-get install -y` over `yes | apt-get install foo`