[LUGSB] David: I need some help on using xargs command

[Richard Yao]

If your python script can take the file name as an argument, you can
do something along the lines of the following:

for i in $(ls); do echo $i; done

Just replace "echo $i" with the command you want to execute and it
will iterate across all files in the present working directory.
Something more fancy that you can do is concatenate lists of
everything in each

for i in $(cat <(for j in $(ls); do echo $j; done)); do echo $i; done

Note that the "<(for j in $(ls); do echo $j; done)" is a subshell that
puts data in a temporary named pipe, which is then provided to the cat
command. You can use as many of these as you want and do all sorts of
things with them. Under the assumption that your script takes the file
name as an argument, it is possible to execute your script on all
files in all directories with a single command.

I hope this is helpful.

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Vacheh David Sardarian
<vsardari at ic.sunysb.edu> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'm stuck and I was wondering if there's anyone that could help me? Here is
> the problem.... I have 35 to 50 files in each folder that I have to process
> using the python script that I wrote. The python script when executes... it
> asks for a file name to be entered. For example, name.txt and it takes the
> file "name.txt" and it does something with it and it outputs name_size.txt.
> The thing is that I have around 35-50 .txt files... and i don't feel like
> copy and pasting 35-50 times every time I execute my python script. So I
> heard that there is a xargs command that can be used to pipe a list of file
> to xargs so that it runs the command on each file... but I have no idea how
> to do this... the more I search on Google the more confused I get... and its
> hard for me to understand the man pages...
>
> I was wondering if John or anyone in the mailing list can give me a hand to
> solve the problem that I'm facing right now.
>
> Thank you,
> David.
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