wGet using sed output in POST request

Question

Fairly new to the world of UNIX and trying to get my head round its quirks.

I am trying to make a fairly simple shell script that uses wGet to send a XML file that has been pre-processed with Sed .

I thought about using a pipe but it caused some weird behaviour where it just outputted my XML into the console.

This is what I have so far:

File_Name=$1
echo "File name being sent to KCIM is : " $1
wget "http://testserver.com" --post-file `sed s/XXXX/$File_Name/ < template.xml` |
 --header="Content-Type:text/xml"

From the output I can see I am not doing this right as its creating a badly formatted HTTP request

POST data file <?xml' missing: No such file or directory Resolving <... failed: node name or service name not known. wget: unable to resolve host address<'

Bonus points for explaining what the problem is as well as solution

Answer 1

For wget the option post-file sends the contents of the named file. In your case you seem to be passing directly the data so you probably want --post-data.

The way you are doing it right now, bash gets the output from sed and wget gets something like:

wget ... --post-file <?xml stuff stuff stuff

So wget goes looking for a file called <?xml instead of using that text verbatim.