bashumerate: A Simple Bash Enumerator to Replace xargs and Complex Loops
I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
I created bashumerate because I was tired of the inconsistent syntax and quirks of xargs and traditional shell loops. This tool offers a unified way to iterate over files, lines, ranges, or lists using a single consistent placeholder. It supports NUL-safe processing, custom filters, and even lets you add your own source types by simply dropping a script into a library folder, making shell scripting cleaner and more reliable.
That's it. No registration, no config — just name the function enumerate_source_<name> and it's available.
- account42
> Consistent syntax — same {} placeholder for files, lines, ranges, or lists
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.
- zxexz
I don’t want to be a downer here, but the structure of this repo and the verbosity+language of the docs feel 80% vibecoded. Not that that’s wrong; I just feel kinda gullible for even clicking on this.
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?
- giov4
I lol'd, but do you think this is valid?
https://github.com/wallach-game/bashumerate/pull/1/files
to me looks like a right solution, even if I was also tired of writing for loops by hand usually
- IdiotSavage
In this thread: bash experts with arcane knowledge, unintentionally demonstrating how awful bash is.
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.
- eqvinox
Not sure I see the point of this. Remembering a bunch of options on one tool is no better than a bunch of tools/constructs? Especially if the latter are useful elsewhere. And it can't be used for scripts unless you start shipping it alongside, which… nah.
Just go with
foo | while read X; do bar "$X"; done
- dundarious
If you want a shell to interact with the results, you can of course just use a (sub)shell.
ls -1 ./*.sh | xargs -rd\\n sh -c 'for i in "$@" ; do ... ; done' sh
1. not strictly necessary to use -1 as I believe all common ls detect !isatty(stdout) and produce line-by-line output anyway.
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.
- db48x
> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces…
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.
- tester457
On the topic of xargs replacements, I love gnu parallel.
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....