Shell Programming and Scripting

how do you pipe the results to next statement as argument?

somecommand | grep $result somefile

how do you reference $result with??

Please read the xargs manpage.

I did and that doesn't seem to help me..

command | xargs grep file

this does not work

1. xargs normally appends the arguments to the command

2. looks like you need it (a) to be the first argument (b) only one argument per iteration, for (b) try the -n 1 xargs switch.

no luck..

I am suprised that there is no easy way to do this??

[root@rleeserver tmp]# cat yahoo
now
[root@rleeserver tmp]# cat yahoo2
never
now
never
[root@rleeserver tmp]# cat yahoo | xargs grep yahoo2
grep: now: No such file or directory
[root@rleeserver tmp]# cat yahoo | xargs -n 1 grep yahoo2
grep: now: No such file or directory

Not sure whether this is what you want?

Code:

[bernardchan@bernardchan shm]$ cat yahoo | xargs -i{} grep {} yahoo2
now

that is really koo and it SHOULD have been what i have been looking for. but.. one unfortunate thing si, i am not running grep.. i am running a awk program.. and it is not liking the argument too much..

this is the awk program i am running

#!/bin/bash
file=$1
name=$2
awk 'BEGIN {FS="\n"; RS=""; ORS="\n\n"}
{if (NF==1) hdrvar=$0; else if ($0~/'$file'/) print hdrvar,"\n",$0 }' $name


so, it does not like the option too much.. but that is very nice to know though