Perform a command on multiple files using command line

Question

Say I have the following files:

myfile1_1.dat
myfile1_2.dat
myfile2_1.dat
myfile2_2.dat
...

and I want to use the same command on each of them (whilst ignoring other files in the directory that do not begin with myfile). Is there an easy way of doing this?

So far, I have been toying with wildcards:

mycommand myfile*.dat

EDIT: I am using both Linux and MinGW

Answer 1

mycommand myfile*.dat will only work if mycommand supports multiple files. If it doesn't, you can use xargs to pass a single file to mycommand as shown below:

echo myfile*.dat | xargs -n 1 mycommand

Alternatively, use a loop:

for file in myfile*.dat; do
    mycommand "$file"
done