Manual Pages  — APPLY

apply – apply a command to a set of arguments

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION ENVIRONMENT FILES EXAMPLES HISTORY AUTHORS BUGS

apply [-a c] [-d] [-#] command argument ...

The apply utility runs the named command on each argument argument in turn.

Character sequences of the form "amp;%d" in command, where 'd' is a digit from 1 to 9, are replaced by the dth following unused argument. In this case, the largest digit number of arguments are discarded for each execution of command.

The options are as follows:

-#
	Normally arguments are taken singly; the optional number -# specifies the number of arguments to be passed to command. If the number is zero, command is run, without arguments, once for each argument. If any sequences of "amp;%d" occur in command, the -# option is ignored.
-a c
	The use of the character '%' as a magic character may be changed with the -a option.
-d
	Display the commands that would have been executed, but do not actually execute them.

The following environment variable affects the execution of apply:

SHELL	Pathname of shell to use. If this variable is not defined, the Bourne shell is used.

/bin/sh
	default shell

apply echo *
	is similar to ls(1);
apply -2 cmp a1 b1 a2 b2 a3 b3
	compares the `a' files to the `b' files;
apply -0 who 1 2 3 4 5
	runs who(1) 5 times; and
apply ln %1 /usr/joe *
	links all files in the current directory to the directory /usr/joe.

The apply command appeared in BSD 4.2 .

Rob Pike

Shell metacharacters in command may have bizarre effects; it is best to enclose complicated commands in single quotes ('').

The apply utility does not recognize multibyte characters.