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apply(1) General Commands Manual apply(1) NAME apply - Applies a command to a set of arguments SYNOPSIS apply [-acharacter] [-number] command argument... The apply command runs the specified command on each argument in turn. OPTIONS Identifies the character used instead of the % (percent sign) to desig- nate argument substitution strings. Specifies the number of arguments to be passed to command. DESCRIPTION Normally, arguments are chosen individually; the optional number speci- fies the number of arguments to be passed to command. If number is 0 (zero), command is run without arguments once for each argument. If you include character sequences of the form %n (where n is a digit from 1 to 9) in command, they are replaced by the nth unused argument following command when command is executed. If any such sequences oc- cur, number is ignored, and the number of arguments passed to command is the maximum value of n in command. You can specify a character other than % (percent sign) to designate argument substitution character strings with the -a option; for exam- ple, -a@ would indicate that the sequences @1 and @2 were to be re- placed by the first and second unused arguments following command. NOTES Shell metacharacters in command may have undesirable effects; it is best to enclose complicated commands in ' ' (single quotes). There is no way to pass a % (percent sign) followed immediately by any number if % is the argument expansion character. EXAMPLES The following command is similar to ls: apply echo * The following com- mand compares the file a1 to the file b1, a2 to b2, and so on: apply -2 cmp a1 b1 a2 b2 ... The following command runs who 5 times: apply -0 who 1 2 3 4 5 The following command links all files in the current di- rectory to the directory /usr/joe: apply 'ln %1 /usr/joe' * SEE ALSO Commands: sh(1), xargs(1) apply(1)