pipe as argument?

[Berk Birand]

Hi,

AS I was reading a book on shell, I came up with a lot of redirection
operators that I did not know. After seeing all these, it occurred to me
that perhaps a feature that I was looking for might have its own operator.

Is it possible to pipe a commands output to another commands command-line
arguments instead of its standard input?

For instance when one does a listing with a simple ls, one gets a bunch of
filenames, such as:
$ ls
COPYING.gz ChangeLog.gz Copyright.gz Problems.gz README.gz timespec.gz

I would like to send these files as arguments to cat in order to print
them all. Now I know that for this particular case, this may be
accomplished by 'cat ./*' , but there are other circumstances in which
such an alternative is unavailable.

Any Ideas?
Thanks
BB

[Urs Thuermann]

Post by Berk Birand
For instance when one does a listing with a simple ls, one gets a bunch of
$ ls
COPYING.gz ChangeLog.gz Copyright.gz Problems.gz README.gz timespec.gz
I would like to send these files as arguments to cat in order to print
them all.

cat `ls`


urs

[Johannes Kloos]

Berk Birand <***@NOSPAMyahoo.com> wrote:
[...]

Post by Berk Birand
Is it possible to pipe a commands output to another commands command-line
arguments instead of its standard input?

You may want to look at the backtick operator:
foo `bar`
calls foo with bar's output as arguments.

[Web Surfer]

[This followup was posted to alt.unix.wizards]

Post by Berk Birand
Hi,
AS I was reading a book on shell, I came up with a lot of redirection
operators that I did not know. After seeing all these, it occurred to me
that perhaps a feature that I was looking for might have its own operator.
Is it possible to pipe a commands output to another commands command-line
arguments instead of its standard input?
For instance when one does a listing with a simple ls, one gets a bunch of
$ ls
COPYING.gz ChangeLog.gz Copyright.gz Problems.gz README.gz timespec.gz
I would like to send these files as arguments to cat in order to print
them all. Now I know that for this particular case, this may be
accomplished by 'cat ./*' , but there are other circumstances in which
such an alternative is unavailable.
Any Ideas?
Thanks
BB

use the backtick operator as follows :

cat `ls *.h`

[Nick Upson]

Post by Berk Birand
I would like to send these files as arguments to cat in order to print

for file in `ls`
do
lp $file
done

# Note the quotes around ls, it uses the ` NOT the ' character

[Bill Marcum]

On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 16:53:40 +0100, Nick Upson

Post by Nick Upson

Post by Berk Birand
I would like to send these files as arguments to cat in order to print

for file in `ls`
do
lp $file
done
# Note the quotes around ls, it uses the ` NOT the ' character

In bash, ksh and some other shells you can also write
for file in $(ls)

[Berk Birand]

Thanks for the replies!

I have also found a little tool that precisely does that, called xargs.
You simply pipe the standard output of a command to "xargs command", and
it runs "command" with those arguments.

I also have found that the -exec feature of find can be extremely helpful
if one knows how to use it. I think I will spend some time mastering that
tool...

Thanks again,
BB