On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 02:31:52PM -0500, Michael Yep wrote: > Hello > > Is there a way to have xargs or perhaps another tool take a list from > stdin and put it somewhere besides the last argument? > > Say if i want to get all the offending IPs (bad logins) for a given day > then i want to take that list and see if its in a file called blacklist > > lastb -ai |fgrep "Jul 18" |awk '{print $10 }'|sort|uniq | xargs grep ??? > blacklist > > where ??? would be where the stdin goes Others have directed you toward "xargs -i", which is correct, but in this particular example, you can do something simpler, lastb -ai |fgrep "Jul 18" |awk '{print $10 }'|sort|uniq \ |fgrep -x -f - blacklist where "-f -" reads the list of patterns from standard input, and "-x" matches the whole line, to eliminate false hits. Under other circumstances, "-w" might be appropriate. This has the virtue of invoking fgrep once and processing all addresses in parallel. Regards, Bill Rugolsky