NAME

apply — apply a command to a set of arguments

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The apply utility runs the named command on each argument argument in turn.

Character sequences of the form “%d” in command, where ‘d’ is a digit from 1 to 9, are replaced by the d´th following unused argument. In this case, the largest digit number of arguments are discarded for each execution of command.

The options are as follows:

-#

Normally arguments are taken singly; the optional number # specifies the number of arguments to be passed to command. If the number is zero, command is run, without arguments, once for each argument.

If any sequences of “%d” occur in command, the -# option is ignored.

-a c

The use of the character ‘%’ as a magic character may be changed with the -a option.

-d

Display the commands that would have been executed, but do not actually execute them.

ENVIRONMENT

The following environment variable affects the execution of apply:

SHELL

Pathname of shell to use. If this variable is not defined, the Bourne shell is used.

FILES

/bin/sh

default shell

EXAMPLES

apply echo *

is similar to ls(1);

apply -2 cmp a1 b1 a2 b2 a3 b3

compares the `a' files to the `b' files;

apply -0 who 1 2 3 4 5

runs who(1) 5 times; and

apply ´ln %1 /usr/joe´ *

links all files in the current directory to the directory /usr/joe.

HISTORY

The apply command appeared in 4.2BSD.

AUTHORS

Rob Pike

BUGS

Shell metacharacters in command may have bizarre effects; it is best to enclose complicated commands in single quotes ('').

The apply utility does not recognize multibyte characters.