Perform grep on individual results of a command spawned by xargs

Question

Is it possible to grep the result of a command spawned by xargs?

As an example I am trying the following command

findbranch prj-xyz -latest|sed 's/^\(.*\/.*\)@@.*$/\1/'|xargs -I {} cleartool lsh {}|grep -m 1 'user'

but seems like grep is executing on the entire result set returned by findbranch, rather individual results of lsh

As an example what I want from above is, for every file returned by findbranch and sed combined I would like to find that version which was last modified by a certain user.

Note If in case it is of a concern, findbranch is an internal utility.

Answer 1

How about this approach?

.... | xargs -I {} bash -c "cleartool lsh {}|grep -m 1 'user'"

I guess, this answer is self explanatory for you...

Answer 2

Why not use a two phase command? something like

findbranch prj-xyz -latest|sed 's/^\(.*\/.*\)@@.*$/\1/' > /tmp/x ; for x in `cat /tmp/x`; do echo $x; done

Once you see $x is the input you need for xargs you can further manipulate it

Answer 3

If you have GNU Parallel this ought to work:

findbranch prj-xyz -latest|sed 's/^\(.*\/.*\)@@.*$/\1/'|parallel cleartool lsh {}'|'grep -m 1 'user'

It will still spawn multiple shells, but at least you can use more CPUs to process it.