Functional ForEach In Bash

Instead of writing long-winded

while IFS= read l; do <<<command>>>; done

you can save space and time using a function. But how to allow flexible use of the line that was read? Functional programmers will recognize familiar foreach command in below:

foreach () { while IFS= read -r l; do eval "$@"; done; }

Notice usage of the evil “eval” function. The eval function is important here to allow flexible usage of the variable “l”. To stay secure always use parenthesis around the variable reference e.g.:

cat files.txt | foreach 'mv "$l" "${l/.txt/.md}"';

Above should keep all evils at bay.

Try it out and let me know below!

I used above foreach method together with functional debounce method in Bash to fix my Lenovo Yoga X260.