Bash - Redirection with wildcards

Question

I\'m testing to do redirection with wildcards. Something like:

./TEST* < ./INPUT* > OUTPUT

Anyone have any recommendations? Thanks.

Answer 1

Say you have the following 5 files: TEST1, TEST1, INPUT1, INPUT2, and OUTPUT. The command line

./TEST* < ./INPUT* > OUTPUT

will expand to

./TEST1 ./TEST2 < ./INPUT1 ./INPUT2 > OUTPUT.

In other words, you will run the command ./TEST1 with 2 arguments (./TEST2, ./INPUT2), with its input redirected from ./INPUT1 and its output redirected to OUTPUT.

To address what you are probably trying to do, you can only specify a single file using input redirection. To send input to TEST from both of the INPUT* files, you would need to use something like the following, using process substitution:

./TEST1 < <(cat ./INPUT*) > OUTPUT

---

To run each of the programs that matches TEST* on all the input files that match INPUT*, use the following loop. It collects the output of all the commands and puts them into a single file OUTPUT.

for test in ./TEST*; do
    cat ./INPUT* | $test
done > OUTPUT