对上面的答案做一点扩展。后面的>将输入引导到文件中，覆盖现有内容。然而，一个特别方便的用法是双箭头>>追加，将您的新内容添加到文件的末尾，如:

cat <<EOF >> /etc/fstab
data_server:/var/sharedServer/authority/cert /var/sharedFolder/sometin/authority/cert nfs
data_server:/var/sharedServer/cert   /var/sharedFolder/sometin/vsdc/cert nfs
EOF

这将扩展fstab，而不必担心意外修改其中的任何内容。

创建json文件的示例:

cat << EoF > ./allaccess.json
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "s3:*"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}
EoF

结果是:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "s3:*"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

用tee而不是cat

不完全是对最初问题的回答，但我还是想分享这个:我需要在一个需要根权限的目录中创建一个配置文件。

下面的方法对这种情况不起作用:

$ sudo cat <<EOF >/etc/somedir/foo.conf
# my config file
foo=bar
EOF

因为重定向是在sudo上下文之外处理的。

我最终用了这个:

$ sudo tee <<EOF /etc/somedir/foo.conf >/dev/null
# my config file
foo=bar
EOF

值得注意的是，这里的文档也在bash循环中工作。 下面的例子展示了如何获取table的列列表:

export postgres_db_name='my_db'
export table_name='my_table_name'

# start copy 
while read -r c; do test -z "$c" || echo $table_name.$c , ; done < <(cat << EOF | psql -t -q -d $postgres_db_name -v table_name="${table_name:-}"
SELECT column_name
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE 1=1
AND table_schema = 'public'
AND table_name   =:'table_name'  ;
EOF
)
# stop copy , now paste straight into the bash shell ...

output: 
my_table_name.guid ,
my_table_name.id ,
my_table_name.level ,
my_table_name.seq ,

或者甚至没有新的线条

while read -r c; do test -z "$c" || echo $table_name.$c , | perl -ne 
's/\n//gm;print' ; done < <(cat << EOF | psql -t -q -d $postgres_db_name -v table_name="${table_name:-}"
 SELECT column_name
 FROM information_schema.columns
 WHERE 1=1
 AND table_schema = 'public'
 AND table_name   =:'table_name'  ;
 EOF
 )

 # output: daily_issues.guid ,daily_issues.id ,daily_issues.level ,daily_issues.seq ,daily_issues.prio ,daily_issues.weight ,daily_issues.status ,daily_issues.category ,daily_issues.name ,daily_issues.description ,daily_issues.type ,daily_issues.owner

这被称为heredoc格式，用于向stdin提供字符串。详情见https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_document#Unix_shells。

来自man bash:

Here Documents This type of redirection instructs the shell to read input from the current source until a line containing only word (with no trailing blanks) is seen. All of the lines read up to that point are then used as the standard input for a command. The format of here-documents is: <<[-]word here-document delimiter No parameter expansion, command substitution, arithmetic expansion, or pathname expansion is performed on word. If any characters in word are quoted, the delimiter is the result of quote removal on word, and the lines in the here-document are not expanded. If word is unquoted, all lines of the here-document are subjected to parameter expansion, command substitution, and arithmetic expansion. In the latter case, the character sequence \<newline> is ignored, and \ must be used to quote the characters \, $, and `. If the redirection operator is <<-, then all leading tab characters are stripped from input lines and the line containing delimiter. This allows here-documents within shell scripts to be indented in a natural fashion.

这并不一定是对最初问题的回答，而是分享我自己测试的一些结果。这样的:

<<test > print.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo \$PWD
echo $PWD
test

将生成与以下相同的文件:

cat <<test > print.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo \$PWD
echo $PWD
test

所以，我不明白使用cat命令的意义。