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I have a program which takes urls as commandline arguments and output a pdf file. For example, I use command substitution to provide the input urls from a file urlsfile

wkhtmltopdf $(cat urlsfile) my.pdf

In urlsfile, each line is a url.

Now I would like to group every 15 lines in urlsfile, and feed a group of urls to the program at a time. How can I do that in bash?

Note that it is acceptable to create a pdf file per 15 urls, and then I will merge the pdf files into one. If the merge can be done by the program, that is better.

Thanks.

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  • cat urlsfile | xargs wkhtmltopdf my.pdf doesn't work, because I only know the program takes inputs from cmdline args, and not sure how to make it take inputs from stdin. Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 17:21
  • For this particular application, the online documentation suggests that wkhtmltopdf provides a --read-args-from-stdin option that may be useful Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 17:32

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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With xargs:

xargs -a urlsfile -n 15 bash -c 'wkhtmltopdf "$@" my_$$.pdf'

or if your xargs doesn't support -a:

cat urlsfile | xargs -n 15 bash -c 'wkhtmltopdf "$@" my_$$.pdf'

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  • Thanks. What does $* my_$$.pdf mean? Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 17:41
  • Cool (+1) xargs is always a source of surprises for me :) Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 18:06
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gawk        '{ f=f " " $0} 
    NR%15==0 { print("wrhtml2pdf " f " " NR/15 ".pdf") ; f=""}' urls

and if you like the output, replace print by system

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