Re: [gentoo-user] OT: shell question, maybe xargs?

[Alexander Kapshuk]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 5:05 AM, Adam Carter <adamcarter3@×××××.com> wrote:
> I have one command that dumps out a number of lines of output, and i want to
> have another command run multiple times taking a single line contents as its
> argument(s) each time. From what i understand of xargs it takes all the
> piped input and runs a command once with each of the piped inputs as another
> argument.
>
> Eg. say i want to run ethtool against each active interface dumped out by;
> ifconfig | grep ^[a-zA-Z] | awk '{print $1}'
>
> Tnx
>

As an alternative solution, you could generate the commands to run like so:

ifconfig | awk -F: '$1 ~ /^[a-zA-z]/ { print "ethtool", $1 }'

And then, either pipe the output of the command line above to sh, or
do this within the awk's print statement like so:

ifconfig | awk -F: '$1 ~ /^[a-zA-z]/ { print "ethtool", $1 | "sh" }'

Or like so:

ifconfig | awk -F: '$1 ~ /^[a-zA-z]/ { system("ethtool", $1) }'