Pipe grep response to a second command? - shell

Question

Here's the command I'm currently running:
curl 'http://test.com/?id=12345' | grep -o -P '(?<=content="2;url=).*?(?=")'
The response from this command is a URL, like this:
$ curl 'http://test.com/?id=12345' | grep -o -P '(?<=content="2;url=).*?(?=")'
http://google.com
I want to use whatever that URL is to essentially do this:
curl 'http://test.com/?id=12345' | grep -o -P '(?<=content="2;url=).*?(?=")' | curl 'http://google.com'
Is there any simple way to do this all in one line?

Answer 1

Use xargs with a place holder for the output from stdin with the -I{} flag as below. The -r flag is to ensure the curl command is not invoked on a empty output from previous grep output.
curl 'http://test.com/?id=12345' | grep -o -P '(?<=content="2;url=).*?(?=")' | xargs -r -I{} curl {}
A small description about the flags, -I and -r from the GNU xargs man page,
-I replace-str
Replace occurrences of replace-str in the initial-arguments with
names read from standard input.
-r, --no-run-if-empty
If the standard input does not contain any nonblanks, do not run
the command. Normally, the command is run once even if there is
no input. This option is a GNU extension
(or) if you are looking for a bash approach without other tools,
curl 'http://test.com/?id=12345' | grep -o -P '(?<=content="2;url=).*?(?=")' | while read line; do [ ! -z "$line" ] && curl "$line"; done