Run two commands on one input (without scripting)

Probably going to get my knuckles rapped for this, here's a hacky combination of bash brace expansion and eval that seems to do the trick

eval {stat,file}" fileName;"

Here is another way:

$ stat filename && file "$_"

Example:

$ stat /usr/bin/yum && file "$_"
  File: ‘/usr/bin/yum’
  Size: 801         Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 804h/2052d  Inode: 1189124     Links: 1
Access: (0755/-rwxr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Context: system_u:object_r:rpm_exec_t:s0
Access: 2014-06-11 22:55:53.783586098 +0700
Modify: 2014-05-22 16:49:35.000000000 +0700
Change: 2014-06-11 19:15:30.047017844 +0700
 Birth: -
/usr/bin/yum: Python script, ASCII text executable

That works in bash and zsh. That also works in mksh and dash but only when interactive. In AT&T ksh, that only works when the file "$_" is on a different line from the stat one.

I think you are asking a wrong question, at least for what you are trying to do. stat and file commands are taking parameters which is the name of a file and not the content of it. It is later on the command which does reading of the file identified by the name you are specifying.

A pipe is supposed to have two ends, one used as input and another one as output and this make sense as you might need to do different processing along the way with different tools until you get needed result. Saying that you know how to pipe outputs but don't know how to pipe inputs is not correct in principle.

In your case you don't need a pipe at all since you have to provide the input in a form of a file name. And even if those tools (stat and file) would read stdin, pipe is not relevant here again as input should not be altered by any of the tool when it gets to the second one.

The way I have found to do this reasonably simply is using xargs, it takes a file / pipe and converts its contents into a program arguments . This can be combined with tee which splits a stream and sends it to two or more programs, In your case you need:

echo filename | tee >(xargs stat) >(xargs file) | cat

Unlike many of the other answers this will work in bash and most other shells under Linux. I shall suggest this is a good use case of a variable but if you absolutely cannot use one this is the best way to do it only with pipes and simple utilities (assuming you do not have a particularly fancy shell).

Additionally you can do this for any number of programs by simply adding them in the same manner as these two after the tee.

EDIT

As suggested in the comments there are a couple of flaws in this answer, the first is the potential for output interlacing. This can be fixed as so:

echo filename | tee >(xargs stat) >(( wait $!; xargs file )) | cat

This will force the commands to run in turn and output will never be interlaced.

The second issue is avoiding process substitution which is not available in some shells, this can be achieved by using tpipe instead of tee as so:

echo filename | tpipe 'xargs stat' | ( wait $!; xargs file )

This should be portable to nearly any shell (I hope) and solves the issues in the other commend, however I am writing this last one from memory as my current system does not have tpipe available.

All of these answers seem like scripting to me, to a greater or lesser extent. For a solution that really involves no scripting, and assumes that you're sitting at the keyboard typing into a shell, you can try:

stat somefile Enter
file Esc_   Enter

In bash, zsh, and ksh at least, in both vi and emacs modes, pressing Escape and then underscore inserts the last word from the previous line into the edit buffer for the current line.

Or, you can use history substitution:

stat somefile Enter
file !$ Enter

In bash, zsh, csh, tcsh, and most other shells, !$ is replaced with the last word of the previous command line when the current command line is parsed.

This should work for all file names in the current directory.

sh -c "$(printf 'stat -- "$1";file -- "$1";shift%.0b\n' *)" -- *

This answer is similar to a couple of the others:

stat filename  &&  file !#:1

Unlike the other answers, which automatically repeat the last argument from the previous command, this one requires you to count:

ls -ld filename  &&  file !#:2

Unlike some of the other answers, this does not require quotes:

stat "useless cat"  &&  file !#:1

or

echo Sometimes a '$cigar' is just a !#:3.