UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Can I use xargs to send a list of commands to a process, to be acted upon individually? Here's what I have: a file that contains numbers, one per line. The desired outcome it to send each number to a DB2 query. I thought xargs would work, but it doesn't. I tried it like this:

cat file | xargs | db2 "select * from table where field = $*"

Can this work somehow?

thanks

Someone else can reply better than I concerning xargs because I rarely use that utility.

FWIW: if I had your problem I would write a 5 line PERL script that:

(1) opens the file
(2) reads each line into a $variable
(3) executes the DB command with $variable.

You can also do this with other shell languages using the same basic idea/algorithm above.

Someone familar with PERL , for example, could write the script faster than it takes to post to the forum because it is just a few lines of code.

Others may want to discuss your xarg problem-solution more directly......


can you believe it?? ...... i was just making a peanut-butter-and-jelly sand' and dropped a big hunk of peanut butter on the keyboard replying to this post ....

xargs would not be my first choice for something like this, but it can certainly be made work. I don't know what the db command is and looking at your syntax, I can't tell where the arg should be inserted, but here is an example using echo:

cat file | xargs -l -i echo "arg is {}"

and even better:

xargs -l -i echo "arg is {}" < file

Hmmm, I gotta admit that using xargs in a case like this is starting to appeal to me...

Thanks everyone. I did get it to work, using xargs with the -n1
option.

file1 is just a list of numbers, one per line:
1234455
7778889



cat file1 | xargs -n1 "db2 select * from table1 where field1 in ('$*')"

Nice job. Thanks for the follow-up post with your solution for everyone interested in xargs to learn from.