a minute. Wait a minute. Doc... Are you telling me that it's $(($time + $diff).ToShortTimeString())? $doc : Precisely. $marty : Damn! I'm late for school! DIGITAL Command Language (DCL) In DCL scripts, any input line which does not begin with a $ symbol is implicitly treated as input to the preceding command - all lines which do not begin with $ are here-documents. The input is either passed to the program, or can be explicitly referenced by the logical name SYS$INPUT (analogous to the Unix concept of stdin). For instance, explicitly referencing the input as SYS$INPUT: $ TYPE SYS$INPUT This text will be directly echoed to the screen by the TYPE command. $! other commands ... produces: This text will be directly echoed to the screen by the TYPE command. Additionally, the DECK command, initially intended for punched card support (hence its name: it signified the beginning of a data deck) can be used to supply input to the preceding command. The input deck is ended either by the command $ EOD, or the character pattern specified by the /DOLLARS parameter to DECK. Example of a program totalling up monetary values: $ RUN ADD_SUMS.EXE $ DECK $13.53 $3.33 $2.33 $ EOD Would produce the following output (presuming ADD_SUMS was written to read the values and add them): $19.19 Example of using DECK /DOLLARS to create one command file from another: $ COPY SYS$INPUT SYS$SCRATCH:TEMP.COM $ DECK /DOLLARS=$$$$ $ TYPE SYS$INPUT This is an example of using DECK to create a command file from within a command file $$$$ $! other commands follow ... YAML YAML primarily relies on whitespace indentation for structure, making it resistant to delimiter collision and capable representing multi-line strings with folded string literals: --- caption: "Example of heredoc-style functionality using YAML" date: "2007-06-01" example: > HTML goes into YAML without modification message: | <blockquote style="font: italic 12pt Times"> <p>"Three is always greater than two, even for large values of two"</p> <p>--Author Unknown</p> </blockquote> See also CDATA Pipeline (Unix) References General Bash Reference Manual 3.6.6 Here Documents 3.6.7 Here Strings Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, Mendel Cooper Chapter 19. Here Documents 19.1. Here Strings External links Here document. Link to Rosetta Code task with examples of here documents in over 15 languages. Programming constructs String (computer science)