xpipe | split input and feed it into the given utility

xpipe is a C library. xpipe has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

The xpipe command reads input from stdin and splits it by the given number of bytes, lines, or if matching the given pattern. It then invokes the given utility repeatedly, feeding it the generated data chunks as input. You can think of it as a Unix love-child of the split(1), tee(1), and xargs(1) commands. It’s usefulness might best be illustrated by an example. Suppose you have a file certs.pem containing a number of x509 certificates in PEM format, and you wish to extract e.g., the subject and validity dates from each. The openssl x509(1) utility can only accept a single certificate at a time, so you’ll have to first split the input into individual files containing exactly one cert, then repeatedly run the x509(1) command against each file. And, let’s be honest, you probably have to google how to use sed(1) or awk(1) to extract subsequent blocks from a flip-flop pattern.