how does ` cat << EOF` work in bash?

Posted by hasen j on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by hasen j
Published on 2010-03-23T13:57:35Z Indexed on 2010/03/23 14:13 UTC
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I needed to write a script to enter multi-line input to a program (psql)

After a big of googling, I found the following syntax works:

cat << EOF | psql ---params
BEGIN;

`pg_dump ----something`

update table .... statement ...;

END;
EOF

This correctly concatenates all these strings and passes the result as an input to psql.

but I have no idea how/why it works, can some one please explain?

I'm referring mainly to cat << EOF, I know > outputs to a file, >> appends to a file, < reads input from file.

What does << exactly do?

And is there a man page for it?

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