README.md

xin

A shell utility like xargs that sends each line of standard input to a command.

Usage

xin works just like the incredibly useful xargs tool, except with one key difference: where xargs passes the standard input (STDIN) to the given command as command-line arguments, xin passes each line of standard input to the given command.

xin [-h] [-L num] [-B] [-P maxprocs] command [arguments...]

-h            Shows help
-L num        Send input into provided command in num-line chunks
-P maxprocs   Run in parallel mode with maxprocs jobs at a time
-B            In parallel, block after maxprocs tasks are started and wait

Example

If you have a file that contains the following text, called woods.txt:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

You can use xin to get a character count for each line by issuing the following command:

$ xin wc -c < woods.txt
      38
      36
      33
      38

xin takes each line from the file and invokes wc -c, passing the line in as standard input for that command.

xin pairs well with tools like jq for processing large files containing JSON objects, and probably, like, dozens of other things. I pronounce it like 'zin', but 'jin' or 'x-in' works too.

Prerequesites

Python 3

Installation

pip install xin

or

git clone <this repo>
cd xin && python ./setup.py install