Is there a way to pipe the output of one AWS CLI command as the input to another?

Question

I\'m attempting to call run-instances and pass the resulting instance IDs as the input to create-tags as a one-liner as follows:

aws ec2 run-instances \\
            


        

Answer 1

It can be done by leveraging xargs {} to capture the instance IDs to feed it into the --resources parameter of create-tags.

aws ec2 run-instances \
    --image-id ami-1234 \
    --output text \
    --query Instances[*].[InstanceId] | \
xargs -I {} aws ec2 create-tags \
    --resources {} \
    --tags 'Key="foo",Value="bar"'

Note that unlike the example in the original question, it's important to wrap the "InstanceId" portion of the --query parameter value in brackets so that if one calls run-instances with --count greater than one, the multiple instance IDs that get returned will be outputted as separate lines instead of being tab-delimited. See http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/controlling-output.html#controlling-output-format