CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesaws-cli
Rafael Dowling Goodman
Rafael Dowling Goodman

Reputation: 913

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

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

When attempting this, I get the following:

usage: aws [options] <command> <subcommand> [<subcommand> ...] [parameters]
To see help text, you can run:

  aws help
  aws <command> help
  aws <command> <subcommand> help
aws: error: argument --resources is required

Is something like this possible or does one have to resort to using variables (or some other way I'm not thinking about)?

Additional Background

The motivation for asking this question is that something like this is possible with the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell; I was hoping to accomplish the same thing with the AWS CLI.

Equivalent PowerShell example:

New-EC2Instance -ImageId ami-1234 |
    ForEach-Object Instances |
    ForEach-Object InstanceId |
    New-EC2Tag -Tag @{key='foo';value='bar'}

Upvotes: 26

Views: 19905

Answers (1)

Frederic Henri
Frederic Henri

Reputation: 53753

It can be done by leveraging xargs -I 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

Upvotes: 39

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