bashbrace-expansion

Bash how to feed multiple command line arguments to Xgraph

Using the Xgraph data plotting tool (XGRAPH), I want to plot a bunch of files named test1.csv test2.csv, ...

The command would be

xgraph -columns 1 2 test1.csv -columns 1 2 test2.csv

and so on· Is there any way I can use brace expansion or some other magic to circumvent manually typing the pattern -columns 1 2 file.csv again and again?

Solution

  • I think this function should work for you...

    graph-build() {
  # loop through commandline filenames and join together
  for file in "${@}"; do
    cmd_build+=(-columns 1 2 "${file}")
  done
  # run xgraph
  xgraph "${cmd_build[@]}"
}

# Run with the expansion as required.
graph-build file{1..3}.csv

    Edit: Syntax updated due to helpful comments highlighting the whitespace issue with filenames in my initial revisions.