/me runs the example on bigbash.it, cleaned up a bit: ( trap "kill 0" SIGINT; export LC_ALL=C; find movies.dat.gz -print0 | xargs

/me runs the example on bigbash.it, cleaned up a bit: ( trap "kill 0" SIGINT; export LC_ALL=C; find movies.dat.gz -print0 | xargs -0 -i sh -c "gzip -dc {} | tail -n +2" | sed "s/::/;/g" | cut -d $';' -f2 | sort -t$';' -k 1,1 | head -n10 | awk -F ';' '{print $1}' ) Yeah, how about no. That's a very neat site and a clever hack, but there are clear escaping flaws in there for valid movie names. bash and standard unix tools are a terrible structured-data manipulator. it's part of why `jq` is so widely used and loved, despite being kinda slow and hard to remember at times - it does things correctly, unlike most glued-together tools.