bash - Passing multiple sets of arguments to a command

instances contains several whitespace separated strings, as does snapshots. I want to run the command below, with each instance-snapshot pair.

ec2-attach-volume --instance $instances --device /dev/sdf $snapshots

For example, if instances contains A B C, and snapshots contains 1 2 3, I want the command to be called like so:

ec2-attach-volume -C cert.pem -K pk.pem --instance A --device /dev/sdf 1
ec2-attach-volume -C cert.pem -K pk.pem --instance B --device /dev/sdf 2
ec2-attach-volume -C cert.pem -K pk.pem --instance C --device /dev/sdf 3

I can do either one or the other with xargs -n 1, but how do I do both?

Using the bash shell, one possible method is:

instances=( `cat instances` )
snapshots=( `cat snapshots` )

for i in ${!instances[@]}; do
    ec2-attach-volume -C cert.pem -K pk.pem \
        --instance ${instances[i]} --snapshot ${snapshots[i]}
done

Here ${!instances[@]} expands to all indexes of the instances array (0, 1, 2, and so on). You can examine the array contents by doing declare -p instances snapshots after the first two lines.

Here’s an approach that includes (some) error handling:

xargs –n 1 < instances > instances.1_per_line    # “xargs –n 1” is equivalent to
xargs –n 1 < snapshots > snapshots.1_per_line    # “xargs –n 1 echo”.
if [ $(wc –l < instances.1_per_line)  !=  $(wc –l < snapshots.1_per_line) ]
then
        echo "Different numbers of strings." >&2
else
        paste instances.1_per_line snapshots.1_per_line | while read inst snap
        do
                ec2-attach-volume -C cert.pem -K pk.pem --instance "$inst" \
                                --device /dev/sdf "$snap"
        done
fi
rm instances.1_per_line snapshots.1_per_line

This may work better than grawity’s answer for large files, as it doesn’t need to read the files into memory.  And this may work better in older versions of bash.  (If $(command) doesn’t work, try `command`.)  On the other hand, my answer will fail if any of the strings in the files contain quote characters.

To do it in parallel you can use GNU Parallel:

parallel --xapply ec2-attach-volume --instance {1} --device /dev/sdf {2} ::: `cat instances` ::: `cat snapshots`

Watch the intro videos to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1