wallach-game/bashumerate — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-05-18
Run the same shell command on every file matching a glob pattern.
Loop over lines from a file or piped input, such as a list of URLs, and run a command on each.
Iterate over a numeric range or a literal list of items in a shell script.
Replace slower xargs or find -exec usage in scripts that process many items.
| wallach-game/bashumerate | edengilbertus/terminalphone | duolahypercho/fusion-fable | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 71 | 71 | 70 |
| Language | Shell | Shell | Shell |
| Setup difficulty | easy | moderate | easy |
| Complexity | 2/5 | 3/5 | 2/5 |
| Audience | developer | general | developer |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Bashumerate is a command line tool that helps you run the same command over and over on a list of items, such as a group of files, the lines of a text file, or a range of numbers. It is meant as a faster, easier to use alternative to older tools like xargs and find with the exec option, which are often used for this exact kind of repeated command running in a terminal. You give the tool one of four kinds of input: a set of files matching a pattern, the lines from a file or from piped input, a numeric range like one to ten, or a plain list of items you type directly. Whatever you provide gets fed one at a time into a command you specify, with a placeholder symbol standing in for each individual item. For example, you could count the lines in every shell script in a folder, or download a list of web addresses one by one from a text file. It also includes some extra conveniences: filtering which items get included or excluded by pattern, running commands in parallel instead of one at a time, a dry run mode that shows you what would happen without actually running anything, and a quiet mode that hides error messages. Developers can add entirely new kinds of input sources by writing a small shell script file, and the README shows an example that lists running Docker containers as a custom source. According to the README's own benchmarks, run on a many core desktop processor, bashumerate is roughly ten to twenty five times faster than xargs for running a command on each of many items, mainly because it avoids writing temporary files and starting a new process for every single item. The project includes its own benchmark script so you can measure this on your own machine, and it ships with a test suite using the bats testing framework. It is written in shell script and released under the MIT license.
A fast command line tool for running the same command repeatedly over files, lines, ranges, or lists, built as a quicker alternative to xargs.
Mainly Shell. The stack also includes Shell, Bash.
Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.
Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.
Mainly developer.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
double-check against the repo, no cap.