I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs

Inconsistent syntax native bash methods so its an additional syntax to learn.

> Template mode — single-quoted commands work as shell templates: enumerate -f '*' -- 'cat {} | head -5'

Passing commands a a single string is BAD. Now you have to think about escaping and quoting. What does {} get replaced with if the enumerant contains unsafe characters? Can it be used as part of a larger argument or only on its own? Who knows, it's not bash. Compared to a bash loop its also always a subshell with all the implications that has - even find can be piped into a normal bash loop.

> Filters — --include and --exclude with glob patterns

A fraction of what find or native loops provide. And since this can't replace them in general enumerate is an additional thing to learn on top.

> Extensible — drop a file in lib/enumerators/ to add custom sources

To extend bash loops you don't even need root access, you just add the code to the loop.

The obvious solution would be to use something more sane, like PowerShell or nushell, but instead old experts will always defend the skills they have honed for years, while criticizing anything that's different.

One uses xargs or parallel only a few times before they remember some of the quirks that but them. And then they become cautious. And then it’s muscle memory. And if it’s not an often occurrence, they learn to check the man page.

Anyways, in a world of “vibecoding” why add another “tool” to the mix when the LLMs have been trained on all our stackoverflow-posted grievances to begin with?

    ls -1 ./*.sh | xargs -rd\\n sh -c 'for i in "$@" ; do ... ; done' sh

2. xargs -r just doesn't run the command if there's no input, also not strictly necessary but I'm addicted to using it because it's the sensible default to me.

3. xargs -d\\n makes it collect fields as full lines, which is what you typically want, unless you're able to generate NULs.

4. use whatever shell you want of course, but I don't use bashisms, etc., by default, /bin/sh is fine for me, even if it's dash.

5. the trailing "sh" at the end is due to a quirk of `sh -c` usage, where $0 is the first non option argument, so `printf %s\\n 1 2 3 | xargs -rd\\n sh -c 'for i in "$@" ; do printf "%s " "$i" ; done ; echo'` (note the lack of trailing "sh") would only print "2 3 " as $0 is not included in "$@" ($0 is 1, $1 is 2, $2 is 3). It's very easy to just always give the shell name itself manually as $0 instead of trying to ingest "$0" into your logic.

Of course, you could `find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.sh' -print0 | xargs -r0 ...` instead, depending on what you're up to, that may be the easiest. It's definitely the simplest -- as long as your xargs has -0 support.

Just go with

  foo | while read X; do bar "$X"; done

Not everyone has the luxury to only work with their own computer, or run random software on IT/customer managed systems.

Always use -0. Most gnu utilities support it. It makes them put a null byte after every filename instead of a newline. Completely eliminates the problem of dealing with whitespace in the filenames.

The --dry-run flag of parallel made me confident to do more batch processing than I ever did with xargs.

Parallel has an option for almost everything, it's almost too much.

But I have shopped around for alternatives. The creator Ole Tange maintains a painstakingly long article of the alternatives and their differences. [0]

The gnu parallel book and reading materials [1] are excellent too.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_alternatives....

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/#Tutorial

(*35 years living and loving sh/ksh/bash/dash etc, only tried pwsh so I could write some comparisons and slag off MS a bit; now it's my default shell on everything)

  find -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} "the {} iterated command"

Additionally the use of "--" is not what everybody expects: here it is used to introduce one argument, the command, while it's usually meant to introduce multiple arguments without worrying if they have a leading "-".

A possible revised syntax with command as the first argument followed by a list of globs optionally introduced by "--" would allow to enumerate all files with a leading "-", which the current syntax cannot:

  enumerate 'whatever {}' -- '-*'

it feel like the syntax here is odd. it still requires me to write quote my command i want to run? unfortunately i'll have to pass on this.

personally i'd want some variant where i can still auto-complete commands and have just have {} as a placeholder. (maybe time to learn how to use xargs for real?)

  find . -name '*.log' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

This null termination is now a POSIX standard.

Fails : enumerate -f '.txt' -- 'wc -l {}'

For all use cases

Correct : enumerate -f '.txt' -- 'wc -l -- {}'

Most of this, if not all, is fixable by adding a `export IFS=$'\n'` to your bashrc. I'm not trying to disregard your project, just point out something that took me years to learn and I currently use extensively to solve this very problem. Perhaps you didn't know about it until now... :)

seq 1 10|xargs -I@ echo 'bash run.py @'|parallel -j 10

I know the echo is a little silly but then I can remove the |parallel and see if it's right. And if I don't want parallelism, I just pass to bash

That's not actually simpler though. Simple is removing everything unnecessary. You took commands which could already do what you wanted, and added an extra program which calls them in specific ways. This will add bugs and maintenance headaches, not be portable, etc. This is added complexity.

The reason you made this script is not because you wanted simpler, you wanted easier. There's nothing wrong with that, and I'll grant you it probably is, especially for those unaccustomed to these commands. But easier != simpler. Often you'll find that simple is hard and easy is complexity deferred.

   for x (*.sh); echo "before $x after"

   for x in *.sh; echo "before $x after"

   for x (*.sh) { echo -n "before "; echo -n $x; echo " after" }

  for f in *.txt; do
    wc -l "$f"
  done

> Or this?

  find . -name '*.sh' -exec wc -l {} +

> These all work, but each has its own syntax, its own flags, its own quirks. I wanted something simpler — one consistent way to iterate over anything.

And therein lies the proverbial xkcd standards[0] proof.

0 - https://xkcd.com/927/