I was trying to find all symbolic links in /usr/lib and use file on the first entry in the list, which I delimited with head -n 1.
Why does find /usr/lib -maxdepth 1 -type l | file $(head -n 1) work but find /usr/lib -maxdepth 1 -type l | head -n 1 | file does not?
It complains that I am not using file correctly. Probably because it lacks an argument, but - programmatically/syntactically - why can’t file grab it’s argument from the pipe?
2>&1pipes stderr to stdout, which would not affect a binary like file which doesn’t parse stdin. You would need something likexargs filewhich would convert the stdout to command line arguments.