xargs

Arch General Commands Manual: xargs

Using sed and xargs to pass a list of arguments to a command from a text file.

For example, to install two lists of packages in Ubuntu:

cat list1.txt list2.txt | sed 's/#.*$//' | xargs sudo apt install

• xargs takes the output from sed as arguments to apt
• sed 's/#.*$//' filters out text after #. So the list2.txt can have comments like this

# Comment
item1
item2  # A comment after an item
    item3  # indent OK