Question

To be quick, this is my command:

echo "user1,user2,user3" | xargs -d, -L 1 usermod -g specialgroup

I want to add multiple existing users to a single group in one single command line. But, the above doesn’t work, however if you put:

echo "user1,user2,user3" | xargs -d, -L 1 echo

It lists you the three users:

user1
user2
user3

Any idea on how I could do it? Even if it’s without the xargs.

Answer 1

Due to a final newline written by echo, user3 becomes user3\n. I’ve tested your example (removing formatting attempts and extraneous echos from the code), and I’ve found it’s the only problem preventing it from working.

Use echo -n "user1,user2,user3" to avoid final newline.