Pattern expansion to run commands

Question

Knowing I am able to run echo or mv to expand patterns like these: echo {0..9}{A..Z}. I am curious to know if there is a way to do the sam

Answer 1

You can use eval:

eval docker-compose\ {stop,rm,'up -d'}\;

Careful escaping/quoting is needed, though. Just test with echo instead of docker that it emits the correct commands:

$ echo docker-compose\ {stop,rm,'up -d'}\;
docker-compose stop; docker-compose rm; docker-compose up -d;

Answer 2

Not the way you mention it.

Brace expansion occurs before any other expansion. This means that when you say echo {0,1}{a,b}, Bash expands the braces before going through any other step. This way, it becomes echo 0a 0b 1a 1b, a single command.

When you mention docker-compose {stop,rm,up -d}, note this would expand to a single command: docker-compose stop rm up -d, which doesn't seem to be valid.

It looks like you would like to run three different commands:

docker-compose stop
docker-compose rm
docker-compose up -d

For this, you may want to use a loop (note "up -d" is quoted so that it is treated as a single argument):

for argument in stop rm "up -d"
do
    docker-compose $argument
done