ls then pipe what it finds to cat?

[GaijinPunch]

Haven't played with bash in a while. I'm actually writing a Perl script and using a bash command to get my input. Instead of using some goofy subroutine to find out what the newest file is, I'm trying to do a directory listing, grep out the files I want to see (in reverse order) tail by 1 so I get the latest file, and then I want to cat out the contents.

I'm doing all of this in a RSH command, and to top it off (as stated before), that command is actually going into a filehandle in perl, so this needs to be a one-liner. I tried
rsh nodename ls -tr /path/to/dir |grep "string" |tail -1
which gives me the file. When I try
rsh nodename ls -tr /path/to/dir |grep "string" |tail -1 |cat
then I still get the file name -- it doesn't cat the contents.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[PHV]

Have you tried something like this ?
1) If the ls must be done remotely
rsh nodename 'cat `ls -tr /path/to/dir |grep "string" |tail -1`'
2) If the ls must be done locally
rsh nodename cat `ls -tr /path/to/dir |grep "string" |tail -1`

Hope This Help
PH.

 

[tikual]

Try:
rsh nodename ls -tr /path/to/dir |grep "string" |tail -1 | xargs cat


tikual

 

[GaijinPunch]

Thanks for the posts guys. Xargs is what I wanted.

PHV: Your solution worked except for one thing - it tried to cat $HOME/file -- not /path/to/dir/file. In this case, tikual's solution worked.