| APPLY(1) | General Commands Manual | APPLY(1) | 
apply —
| apply | [ -ac]
      [-#] command
      arguments ... | 
apply divides its arguments into
  fixed-size groups and runs command in turn on each
  group.
On each execution of command, each character
    sequence of the form “%d” in
    command, where d is a digit from
    1 to 9, is replaced with the d´th argument from
    the current argument group. The argument group size is set to the largest
    such d found. Any given argument number can be used
    arbitrarily many times. (Including zero.)
If no explicit substitution sequences are found in
    command, the current argument group is substituted
    after command delimited by spaces, and the argument
    group size defaults to 1 and can be set with the -#
    option.
If the argument group size is set to 0, one argument from arguments is taken for each execution of command anyway, but is discarded and not substituted; thus, command is run verbatim once for every argument.
The options are as follows:
-#-ac%” to c.apply:
SHELLapply
    echo *apply
    -2 diff a1 b1 a2 b2 a3 b3apply
    -0 who 1 2 3 4 5apply
    ´ln %1 /home/joe/joe.%1´ *apply
    ´cvs diff %1 > %1.diff' *.capply command appeared in
  4.2BSD.
To protect a shell metacharacter fully it must be quoted twice, once against the current shell and once against the subshell used for execution. Similarly, for a shell metacharacter to be interpreted by the subshell it must be quoted to protect it from the current shell. A simple rule of thumb is to enclose the entire command in single quotes ('') so that the current shell does not interpret any of it.
apply unconditionally inserts
    "exec" at the beginning of each copy of
    command so compound commands may not behave as
    intended.
| March 12, 2016 | NetBSD 10.0 |