UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello... I happened upon this site when searching for an answer, and I consider myself a UNIX dummy, so here I am!

Here's my issue: I'm trying to use xargs to strip blank lines out of a group of files and copy the output to another directory, and I just can't figure out the syntax. Here's what I have:

xargs -I {} sed '/^$/d' {} < FILE_NAME_LIST.dat

Which works, but I can't figure out how to output it. If I use

xargs -I {} sed '/^$/d' {} < FILE_NAME_LIST.dat > /some/directory

or

xargs -I {} sed '/^$/d' {} > /some/directory < FILE_NAME_LIST.dat

I get a message stating that it's a directory, as if expecting the output to be a single file. If I use

xargs -I {} sed '/^$/d' {} > /some/directory/{} < FILE_NAME_LIST.dat

Then everything outputs to a file named '{}', instead of separate files based on the filenames in FILE_NAME_LIST.dat. I'm sure it's just a simple thing, but I can't think through it. Any takers? Thanks in advance!

You cannot redirect output to a directory; it must be to a file.

I see that, but is there any way to use the placeholder ('{}' in this case) to denote individual file names for the output? For instance, if FILE_NAME_LIST.dat contained the following lines:

File1.dat
File2.dat
File3.dat

Is there any way to create/execute these three lines using xargs or any other command?

sed '/^$/d' File1.dat > /some/directory/File1.dat
sed '/^$/d' File2.dat > /some/directory/File2.dat
sed '/^$/d' File3.dat > /some/directory/File3.dat

Unlike the listed files, the ones in question will have vastly different filenames, so I won't be able to just loop through them with some iterator to get the desired effect, unfortunately.

Why make it so complicated?

Code:

while read file ; do
    sed '/^$/d' $file > /other/dir/$file
done < FILE_NAME_LIST.dat

If I knew it was that easy, I never would have been here! I was too stuck on xargs, I couldn't think of a different way to do it, but that makes perfect sense, and worked like a charm. Thanks so much!