Pipe the result of a cut command to curl

Question

I have a csv file that contains 3 fields per line.

firstname,lastname,url

I'm trying to access the url via the following pipeline:

grep theName file.csv | cut -d, -f 3

then I want to add another pipe and use the results of the cut command in a curl command like so:

grep theName file.csv | cut -d, -f 3 | curl > result.txt

problem is, when i do the above, the curl command throws an error, i assume because curl doesn't have an argument?

how can I use the result of cut to curl the resulting url? Thanks in advance. =)

Answer 1

Leverage command substitution, $():

curl "$(grep ... | cut -d, -f 3)"

Here $() will be substituted by the STDOUT of the command inside $() i.e. grep ... | cut -d, -f 3, as this is done by the shell first so the curl command would be finally:

curl <the_url>

Answer 2

Another solution without substitution:

grep theName | cut -d, -f 3 | xargs curl > result.txt