Question

I have a program that returns me a list of file names. I need to pass these file’s contents to another program.

I know how to use cat to pass content:

cat file1 file2 file3 | some_program

what I want to do is something like:

list=`get_file_list`
cat ${list} | some_program

Though doing the above will simply pass the content of the list variable, rather than the files’ content.

Answer 1

To pass the output of,a program to another you can use xargs, for example

     find . -name "myfile*" -print | xargs grep "myword" $1

This one searches for files called myfile* and look for a key inside of them.