Putting together xargs and touch

[bdlbfrb08]

Hi all,

I am scripting in bash, I call another program, and then I want to touch files that have the name and timestamp of my grep output (the 2 and 3 arguments respectively). I have a work around where I use awk, and then put it into xargs, but I think there should be a way to put it into xargs directly. Additionally my current way seems to be slow, probably because I am opening so many shell processes. I think I should be able to replace awk|xargs with a single xargs because I know xargs has awk-like capabilities. I am just not that familiar with xargs.

#! /bin/bash
../fametouch-prog.sh $1 | fame -nomsg -d .\
| grep SERIESTS \
| awk '{ printf "touch -t " $3 " " $2 "\n" }' \
| xargs -I {} -i sh -c '{}'


The first line of the script (or 2nd if you count /bin/bash) is just calling the other software and producing some output.

So I guess I end up with 3 questions, is a single xargs going to be significantly faster? Is it possible? and any help on how to do it would be appreciated.

Thanks.