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?

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.orgOP
    2·
    2 days ago

    I guess you are right. I even point such things out on others, so fair enough. I will update the example, as I don’t want someone to see this and take it as a good example. For the alias, I never use aliases in scripts anyway. These are always for interactive usage for me at least. In scripts i follow some other rules, such as use longer names for options (unless it is a really common one).