Another useful idiom for command-line junkies to learn is
list-of-something | do-something-with-each-item
This can be expressed in a number of different ways. My go-to way is the following:
list-of-something | while read f;do do-something-with-each-item $f;done;
The real beauty is this can be built up incrementally, testing out the commands until one has got it right.
For example, to confirm the syntax of a the
do-something-with-each-item, I prefix it with an echo to see what
command is going to be run i.e.
list-of-something | while read f;do echo do-something-with-each-item $f;done;
If the list-of-something is very large or to confirm that I have the right
subset of the list, I add some filters i.e.
list-of-something | grep something | head | while read f;do echo do-something-with-each-item $f;done;
The benefit of this incremental/iterative way of building up a command is
that it is quick – up-arrow, edit the command and enter to try again.
The keystrokes to master and memorise are
while read f;do $f;done;
These are then embellished by adding a list-of-something | before the
while, and an echo do-something-with-item before the $f.