Question

I’d like to use arguments from file as command-line arguments for some commands like gcc or ls.

For example gcc -o output -Wall -Werro

as file consist of:

-o output -Wall -Werro

Used for gcc command-line call.

Answer 1

You can use xargs:

cat optionsfile | xargs gcc

Edit: I’ve been downvoted because Laurent doesn’t know how xargs works, so here’s the proof:

$ echo "-o output -Wall -Werro" > optionsfile
$ cat optionsfile | xargs -t gcc
gcc -o output -Wall -Werro
i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1: no input files

The -t flag causes the command to be written to stderr before executing.