mjhjmtu

Given an application, myApplication, that streams lines to stdout

$ myApplication
flag1
flag2
flag3

How do I use xargs to pass those values as flags to a command instead of passing them as parameters?

For example, the resulting invocations should be:

anotherApplication --flag "flag1" parameterNotFromXargs
anotherApplication --flag "flag2" parameterNotFromXargs
anotherApplication --flag "flag3" parameterNotFromXargs

My failed attempt using the -I option produced the wrong output:

$ myApplication | xargs -L1 -I % echo "e: %"
e: %
e: %
e: %

Unable to replicate:

$ echo -e "onentwonthree" | xargs -L1 -I% echo "I was told % times"
I was told one times
I was told two times
I was told three times

If myApplication is returning its output on standard input, the above invocation of xargs should work properly. If the output you are seeing is actually standard error, you need to redirect that to standard output with myApplication 2>&1.

The easiest way is a script

#!/bin/sh
anotherApplication --flag "$1" parameterNotFromXargs

And call it with

myApplication | xargs -L1 ./myscript.sh

If you want to avoid the script, you can use give the command inline:

myApplication | xargs -L1 sh -c 'anotherApplication --flag "$1" parameterNotFromXargs' _