Bash: Build and execute command lines on the fly with "xargs"

xargs is a powerful bash tool that can take input from $STDIN and pass it to a given command. I.e. you can do the following:

$> cat tmp/parallel_cucumber_failures.log
features/authentication.feature:33
features/backend/pages.feature:5
features/backend/pages.feature:60

$> cat tmp/parallel_cucumber_failures.log | xargs geordi cucumber
# Running features
> Only: features/authentication.feature:33 features/backend/pages.feature:5 features/backend/pages.feature:60
...

Beside the linked article you might also be interested in reading An Opinionated Guide to xargs Show archive.org snapshot .

unixmantra.com

Dominik Schöler

makandra.de

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Last edit

Over 2 years ago

Emanuel

License

Source code in this card is licensed under the MIT License.

Working on the Linux command line: How to bash `cd` with autocorrect

There is an option you can set so that when using the cd command, small typos are automatically corrected. Add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

# cd: autocorrect small typos and use best guess
shopt -s cdspell

Example:

cd P...

Working on the Linux command line: Use the `tree` command instead of repeated `cd` and `ls`

The tree command will show you the contents of a directory and all it's sub directories as a tree:

>tree
.
├── a
│   ├── file_1.txt
│   └── file_2.txt
└── b
    ├── c
    │   └── even_more.txt
    └── more.txt

3 directories, 4 files

I...

Posted by Dominik Schöler to makandra dev (2016-12-02 08:17)

Bash: Build and execute command lines on the fly with "xargs"

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