With Docker, you can specify the command to run inside the container on the command line. But what if you want to run multiple commands? You can’t escape the && syntax, or wrap the command in quotes, as Docker won’t recognise it. The trick here is to use
sh -c ”
For example, to run date and whoami in a vanilla ubuntu container, we would run the following:
$ docker run ubuntu:latest sh -c ‘date && whoami’
Wed Feb 18 00:42:53 UTC 2015
root
This works because sh -c ” is one call; the commands will be split and executed from within sh.