How to read from a file or standard input in Bash

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The following solution reads from a file if the script is called with a file name as the first parameter $1 and otherwise from standard input.

while read line
do
  echo "$line"
done < "${1:-/dev/stdin}"

The substitution ${1:-...} takes $1 if defined. Otherwise, the file name of the standard input of the own process is used.

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