Easy shell solution to execute a command for each line of stdout

Question

Hi,

This should be an absurdly easy task: I want to take each line of the stdout of any old command, and use each to execute another command with it as an argument.

For example:

ls | grep foo | applycommand 'mv %s bar/'

Where this would take everything matching "foo" and move it to the bar/ directory.

(I feel a bit embarrassed asking for what is probably a ridiculously obvious solution.)

Answer 1

That program is called xargs.

ls | grep foo | xargs -I %s mv %s bar/

Answer 2

ls | grep foo | while read FILE; do mv "$FILE" bar/; done

This particular operation could be done more simply, though:

mv *foo* bar/

Or for a recursive solution:

find -name '*foo*' -exec mv {} bar/ \;

In the find command {} will be replaced by the list of files that match.

Answer 3

for your case, do it simply like this.

for file in *foo*
do
   if [ -f "$file" ];then
      mv "$file" /destination
   fi
done

OR just mv it if you don't care about directories or files

mv *foo* /destination