In keeping with the fundamentals, here's a handy one-liner to save yourself a few extra commands.

Problem

We want to delete a number of machines via Salt Cloud, but we want it in a one-liner because we hate typing the same thing over and over.

$ salt-key
Accepted Keys:
esdata-01
esdata-02
esdata-03
esdata-05

Four machines. But we want to avoid up-arrowing or copy/pasting each individual one. So...

Solution

$ salt-cloud -d $( for x in 1 2 3 5; do echo "esdata-0${x}"; done)
The following virtual machines are set to be destroyed:
  vmware:
    vmware:
      esdata-01
      esdata-03
      esdata-02
      esdata-05

And we're done. No, it's not exciting for four machines. But imagine four-hundred. Or even some uknown number that you need to hit an API for. It's the little things like this that put us in alignment with the theory of Large Gains from Small Efficiencies.