Bash – In bash, feed output of one command line-by-line into another command

bash

I have the following bash command which fetches and block XML from a single column in mysql and feeds it into xmllint to prettify it.

mysql --format csv --skip-column-names -e "select xmldata from mytable limit 1;" | xmllint --format -

So far so good, but it only works for one row at a time. I would like to adapt this so each line in the SQL query output is fed in to a separate call to xmlint.

I know this can be done with a loop in a bash script — but I'd like to do it in a one-liner if possible. Supposedly this can be done with xargs but I can't figure it out.

Best Answer

mysql --format csv --skip-column-names \
    -e "select xmldata from mytable limit 1;" \
    | while IFS= read -r line; do xmllint --format - <<<"$line"; done

Split for easier reading, obviously you don't need to. The <<<$line is a herestring, which feeds the contents of $line to xmllint as stdin.

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