Apply a function to every specified column in a data.table and update by reference

Question

This seems to work:

dt[ , (cols) := lapply(.SD, "*", -1), .SDcols = cols]

The result is

    a  b d
1: -1 -1 1
2: -2 -2 2
3: -3 -3 3

There are a few tricks here:

Because there are parentheses in (cols) :=, the result is assigned to the columns specified in cols, instead of to some new variable named “cols”.
.SDcols tells the call that we’re only looking at those columns, and allows us to use .SD, the Subset of the Data associated with those columns.
lapply(.SD, ...) operates on .SD, which is a list of columns (like all data.frames and data.tables). lapply returns a list, so in the end j looks like cols := list(...).

EDIT: Here’s another way that is probably faster, as @Arun mentioned:

for (j in cols) set(dt, j = j, value = -dt[[j]])