Piping data to multiple processes |Fernando Ipar

By fernando | March 10, 2011

Piping data to multiple processes

Here’s a simple shell script to stream data to multiple processes. It has many applications, but the reason I wrote it is to stream the same data to multiple netcat processes on remote machines.

Here’s the code:

#!/bin/bash

usage()
{
cat <&2

usage : multi-fifo target0 [target1 [target2 [...]]]

Where each targetN is a program you want to send the input multi-fifo receives

EOF

}

[ $# -eq 0 ] && usage && exit 1

i=0
pipeline="tee /dev/null"
while [ -n "$1" ]; do
target=$1
fifo=/tmp/multi-fifo-$$.$i
mkfifo $fifo
eval "$target < $fifo" &
pipeline="$pipeline | tee $fifo"
i=$((i+1))
shift
done

eval "cat | $pipeline"

j=0
while [ $j -lt $i ]; do
rm -f /tmp/multi-fifo-$$.$j
j=$((j+1))
done

Usage is pretty straightforward:

tar cjvf - . | ./multi-fifo "nc host1 9999" "nc host2 9999" >/dev/null

This way, the script will create a fifo for each netcat client, then send it’s stdin to a pipeline that writes to both fifos using tee. Useful for example if you want to stream a backup to multiple destination servers for cloning.

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