Determine If Shell Input is Coming From the Terminal or From a Pipe

"Working on a little script the other day I had the need to determine if the input to the script was coming from a pipe or from the terminal. Seems like a simple enough thing to determine but nothing jumped immediately to mind and a quick internet search didn't help much either. After a bit of pondering I came up with two solutions: the stat command and using information from the proc file system.

"The first solution uses the stat command to determine what type of file is connected to standard input. First we find out what is connected to standard input:"

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