dotfiles/lang/shell

BASH

Something that I've come across from time to time is to pipe the output of one command into the input of another command.

Use Case

Generally I run which or type -a [EXECUTABLE] to print the path to the executable, and then the next step in my process is to check to see what kind of file the [EXECUTABLE] is, ie. it's useful to make sure I'm checking the correct [EXE] if multiple exes are in my path with the same name, and running file on the above output of which lets me know what type of file the executable is, ie. a binary compiled or a sh shell script. So to do a little two step combo

which airport | xargs ls -l
which airport | xargs file

The above command will let me know that the airport file in my path is a symlink to a Mach-0 executable.