I created a simple alias for xargs, with the intend to pipe it when needed. It will simply run a command for each line of it. My question to you is, is this useful or are there better ways of doing this? This is just a little bit of brainstorming basically. Maybe I have a knot in my head.
# Pipe each line and execute a command. The "{}" will be replaced by the line.
# Example:
# find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -name 'M*' | foreach grep "USB" {}
alias foreach='xargs -d "\n" -I{}'
For commands that already operate on every line from stdin, this won’t be much useful. But in other cases, it might be. A more simplified usage example (and a useless one) would be:
find . -maxdepth 1 | foreach echo "File" {}
It’s important to use the {} as a placeholder for the “current line” that is processed. What do you think about the usefulness? Have you any idea how to use it?
A bit of a tangent, but I almost never use
xargsin the shell anymore, and instead use “while read line ; do *SOMETHING* $line ; done”, becausexargsdoesn’t have access to the shell’s local variables, aliases, or functions.True that the loop is easier to work with, though you can still pass args/env into the sub shell, and xargs’ -P is one of my favorites depending on the task (may not be desired in this case). Sometimes I’ve done both: echo assembled commands in a loop/find -exec, sanity check output, then pipe to xargs … bash -c to run in parallel.
Good point! A
whileloop is probably more flexible here and easier to expand too. I will experiment a bit more and maybe I’ll change to awhile readlineimplemented as a Bash function.