How to apply same function to every specified column in a data.table

Question

I have a data.table with which I\'d like to perform the same operation on certain columns. The names of these columns are given in a character vector. In this particular ex

Answer 1

To add example to create new columns based on a string vector of columns. Based on Jfly answer:

dt <- data.table(a = rnorm(1:100), b = rnorm(1:100), c = rnorm(1:100), g = c(rep(1:10, 10)))

col0 <- c("a", "b", "c")
col1 <- paste0("max.", col0)  

for(i in seq_along(col0)) {
  dt[, (col1[i]) := max(get(col0[i])), g]
}

dt[,.N, c("g", col1)]