I have some logs that contain url with encoded characters and I need to extract some data out of the urls. Searching around lead me to this stackexchange's answer:-

alias urldecode='python3 -c "import sys, urllib.parse as ul;print(ul.unquote_plus(sys.argv[1]))"'

Then you can use it as:-

urldecode '%22status%22%3A%22SUCCESS%22'
"status":"SUCCESS"

Now that's perfect. But the data that I want to decode must be passed through unix pipe, like this:-

grep 'status: 504' /var/log/local0* | awk '{ print $10}' | xargs urldecode

But this won't work, as xargs won't see the alias. So we alias xargs as well:-

alias xargs='xargs '

But that however only work for the first line. How to make xargs execute for each line?

alias xargs='xargs -L 1 '

Now we can run urldecode for each line we piped from grep!