piping question...

Hi there, hopefully a relatively simple question...

I'm a newbie to this scripting business, and as in new I mean this morning, so please don't laugh....

can you have 2 commands on the left side of a pipe? ie:

arg1 arg2 | function

if not is there any other was of implementing something similar?

many thanks,

Bec.

We all started somewhere!
Not sure whether this is exactly what you mean but:

you can use a filter like sort in conjunction with two pipes.
For example, say you had a file called myfile which you wanted to sort into a version sorted alphabetically by line, and then pipe that to a printer, the following would work:



So this generates the sorted file, and pipes it to the cat command (the -n makes cat take the sorted file as its input) which then in turn pipes the result to the printer.

Is this the sort of thing you're trying to do?

Hi,

I'll try and explain my problem in more detail.

I have a function that takes 2 arguments. This function needs to be called automatically as and when needed.

I have a java application which will write the arguments for the function to a file ready for a script to pick up. I am assuming there is no Java/shell script connectivity API??

I was thinking of writing a script something along the lines of:

[CODE]
while [ 1 ]
do
for sourcefile in /serverdump/*; do
sourcefile | function
rm sourcefile
done
done
[CODE]

if the file content had spaces in between the data and this was applied to a function as input, would the data be taken as 2 separate arguments anyway? If so that would solve the problem.

If not I need to extract the arguments from the sourcefile and apply them to the function somehow.

hope this makes a bit more sense!

Pass the arguments the way you would do it command line

like cp somefile toanotherfile

pipes are to send the result of one to another like if you wanted to do a directory listing page by page you would do a

ls -lah | more