How do I redirect output of command into ls? [duplicate]

Question

I have a problem with redirections :

$ which python3

gives me

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3

and

$ ls -l /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3

gives me

lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  9  5 fév 18:30 /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3 -> python3.7

but

which python3 | ls -l

don't gives me the same result.

Do you know why ? And what is the right command for redirection ?

I'm using OSX.

I have to say that the following question pass the output of previous command to next as an argument may be the same as this one, but if I look the answers that were given, there I'm lost. To be useful, they require more advanced knowledge or study than those given here.

Answer 1

ls does not take input from standard in, but only from arguments:

Try ls -l "$(which python3)"

Answer 2

ls does not read from the pipe. In fact, ls does not use its standard input at all.

Instead, you have to pass the thing you'd like to run ls -l on via the command line of ls:

ls -l "$( which python3 )"

This uses a command substitution on the command line of ls -l which will expand to the output of the which command. This will then be used as a command line argument for ls.

Alternatively:

ls -l "$( command -v python3 )"

Related:

• Why not use "which"? What to use then?

Answer 3

Other answers are good, but this is also handy:

which python3 | xargs ls -l

xargs gets values from stdin and appends them as command-line argument to the specified program.