<
reads from its right argument and writes to its left argument.
To write a file into STDIN
we should read /tmp/a_file
and write into STDIN
i.e 0</tmp/a_file
Note: Internal file descriptor defaults to 0
(STDIN
) for <
$ echo "b" > /tmp/list.txt
$ echo "a" >> /tmp/list.txt
$ echo "c" >> /tmp/list.txt
$ sort < /tmp/list.txt
a
b
c