How do I open file list outputted from find command?

Question

I have a working find query find . -type f | gshuf -n2 find . -type f | gshuf -n2 find . -type f | gshuf -n2 which returns two lines of files. I know I can open files in text edit through open -a TextEdit ./text.txt but how would I put these together so Textedit opens them after finding instead of me manually copying and pasting?

I tried variations like

open -a TextEdit find . -type f | gshuf -n2
open -a TextEdit (find . -type f | gshuf -n2)

etc

Can this be done in one command or if not what's the best way?

Answer 1

You were close with your second attempt. To substitute the output of a command into a command line, you use $( command ) .

open -a TextEdit $(find . -type f | gshuf -n2)

However, this won't work properly if any of the filenames have spaces in their names, because each word will be treated as a separate filename. This will work better:

find . -type f | gshuf -n2 | while read filename; do
    open -a TextEdit "$filename"
done

The double quotes prevent the name from being split up.