Can anyone give me an example of how to run an argument past each line of a file and run a command? For example...

I have a file with these lines in it at /home/mijohnst/filelist.txt

# A list of Files
/home/mijohnst/dir1/testfile1.sh
/home/mijohnst/dir2/testfile2.sh
/home/mijohnst/dir3/testfile3.sh
/home/mijohnst/dir4/testfile4.sh
/home/mijohnst/dir5/testfile5.sh
/home/mijohnst/dir6/testfile6.sh

What command would I run to read each line of this file and run a command? Say that I wanted to copy all of those files into the /tmp directory...

I'm thinking something like "cat /home/mijohnst/filelist.txt | ..." something...

I know this is easy, but I'm really drawing a blank...

Thanks in advance!

cat /home/mijohnst/filelist.txt | awk '{print "somecommand",$1}' | bash

Thanks macemoneta! For some reason I don't remember doing this at all...

There are probably a dozen ways (or more) to accomplish the same thing. I prefer to remember the use of a few commands (grep, cut, paste, sed, awk, tr), and find that I can accomplish almost anything I need with them. There are more elegant ways to do things, but they tend to use "one trick ponies" instead of more flexible tools.

Well, Linux hasn't been my main OS until recently so I haven't mastered these commands yet. I'm learning as I go thanks to people like you.

I'm trying to understand the flow of the command you just showed me, but I guess that I'm thinking of it wrong.

When I do:

cat /home/mijohnst/filelist.txt | awk '{print "cp /tmp",$1}' | bash

I get an error for each line that says "Omitting /tmp" and nothing is copied... Did I misunderstand what you were trying to tell me?

The command, as you entered it, is trying to do the following:

cp /tmp /home/mijohnst/dir1/testfile1.sh
...

Leave off the last pipe (" | bash") to see the results before you try to execute.

If you want to copy each of the files to /tmp, then you need to rework the pipe to:

cat /home/mijohnst/filelist.txt | awk '{print "cp",$1,"/tmp"}' | bash

Each entry in the file /home/mijohnst/filelist.txt is passed to awk. It will print "cp" a space (because of the comma) the first space delimited word from the file (for example, "/home/mijohnst/dir1/testfile1.sh") another space and then "/tmp".

Run this instead:

cat /home/mijohnst/filelist.txt | awk '{print "cp",$1,"/tmp"}'

Without the final bash command, the output of awk will simply be displayed at the terminal. Once you have the commands the way you want them, you can send them to bash for execution by adding the pipe to a bash shell " | bash".

for i in `cat filelist`;do echo "$i";done

Replace (echo "$i") with the command you want to run.
I use this command all the time to work on multiple files.

Why are you guys so obsessed with cat()ing files into filters that take filename arguments?
Anyway, if the file only has the commands in it (as posted)
is the easiest way to run it.

The way I read the question

mijohnst doesn't want to run all the scripts, but wants to run a command on each one, such as copy them to the /tmp directory

That's exactly right /bin/bash.

Thank you guys so much! Your help has provided the exact means of getting my job done and it works!

I need a good linux command example site for newbies so that I don't have to post so many dumb questions. Thanks again all!

I think this is simpler, and allows for comments in the source file:

Of course LQ has many HOWTO's and tutorials available. And here are a few more.

Linux-tip.net

SuperMan Pages

Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition

Linux StepByStep.org