Pipe lines of text into a linux command

Question

Say I have a file which contains several hundred lines of content for example:

content.txt contains lines in the format

element1\n
element2\n
element3\n
...

Using the command line in linux is it possible to run a linux program with each element in the file minus it's \\n as an argument

for example:

$ linuxCommand element1
$ linuxCommand element2
$ linuxCommand element3
$ linuxCommand ...

Answer 1

You can do it like this:

cat content.txt | while read line; do linuxCommand "$line"; done

With the bash shell, this is also possible:

for line in $(<content.txt); do linuxCommand "$line"; done

Answer 2

Yes, use xargs :

xargs -l linuxCommand <content.txt

The -l command line option limits the number of arguments for each invocation of linuxCommand to one.