Execute string result from shell script as a set of shell commands

Question

I create a string result from my shell script and i want to execute it as a shell command.

For example file_a is:

user1@gmail.com
user2@gmail.com

script:

awk '{print "mail -s \"welcome\"", $1}' file_a

And result:

mail -s "welcome" user1@gmail.com
mail -s "welcome" user2@gmail.com

So i want to execute the result as a set of shell commands.

Answer 1

You want to look into the eval command.

eval $(awk '{print "mail -s \"welcome\"", $1}' file_a)

---

EDIT: You're right @manatwork--eval as I demonstrated wouldn't really work for multiple lines. I was trying to answer Navid's question as he asked it, but really I shouldn't have been afraid to ask him why he wasn't just using a for loop, i.e.:

for m in $(<file_a); do mail -s welcome $m

Answer 2

A couple of ways:

• write the output of awk to a file, make the file executable, and then execute it
• use the system() function in the awk script:

Answer 3

Directly reading and executing command in bash.

for i in `<file_a`; do mail -s "welcome" $i; done

Answer 4

You can play with xargs.

xargs - build and execute command lines from standard input

And a example couple be like this

awk '{print "mail -s \"welcome\"", $1}' file_a | xargs -0 bash -c

Answer 5

You could pipe the result of àwk to bash:

awk '{print "mail -s \"welcome\"", $1}' file_a | bash

But be careful on the output of the 1st command, as if file_a contains some tricky lines, you could execute unwanted commands.