Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello, I'm starting from the scratch with Unix, and I was wondering if you could give me an answer for this problem...

I've got a column with different names of files, something like:
./file1
./file2
...
Now, I would like to show the content of each file. The column with the names comes from a pipeline, but I think that doesn't matter in this case.

Of course I know about "cat", but if I type "....commands wich generate the above column.... | cat " the result is just the same.

Thanks in advance.

P.D. I know it's easy, but I'm so noob

I am not actually sure what you are asking. I understand that you will have a column of file names.. are you just wanting to cat those files and display the output?

Code:

echo -e "test2.txt\ntest.txt\ntest.txt.bak" | xargs cat

The echo will output those few files, one on each line, and the results are piped to xargs ( man xargs ), and xargs executes cat on each of the files, displaying the results of each.

Yes, that's the point. But, actually, I'm working with Plan9, wich is not exactly Unix, and xargs does not exist here. Anyway thank you for your help. I will think about how I could do it in other way.

well if you can't do it that way, you can do it like..

Code:

for file in `get list of files here`; do
    cat $file;
done

Inside of where you see 'get list of files here', replace it with how you get your files.

Thank you so much. I was trying something like your for, but I didn't really know how I could put my pipelines into my 'get list of files here'.

Anyway that problem belongs to the past, because of you. Thank you.

haha, no problem, basically inside of the backticks, you can do any shell commands.. you just need to make sure it returns the list of files.