Question

What would be the process of making my Python scripts work well with ‘xargs’? For instance, I would like the following command to work through each line of text file, and execute an arbitrary command:

cat servers.txt | ./hardware.py -m 

Essentially would like each line to be passed to the hardware.py script.

Answer 1

To make your commands work with xargs you simply need them to accept arguments. Arguments in Python are in the sys.argv list. In this way you can execute somthing like:

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 ./myscript.py

which might be equivalent to

./myscript.py ./foo.txt ./biz/foobar.txt ./baz/yougettheidea.txt

To make your commands work with standard input, you can also use the sys module, this time with sys.stdin, which you can treat as a file. This is more like the example you gave:

./myscript.py < somefile.txt