Xargs

Xargs

Set tab as delimiter (default:space)

xargs -d\t

Prompt commands before running commands

ls|xargs -L1 -p head

Display 3 items per line

echo 1 2 3 4 5 6| xargs -n 3
# 1 2 3
# 4 5 6

Prompt before execution

echo a b c |xargs -p -n 3

Print command along with output

xargs -t abcd
# bin/echo abcd
# abcd

With find and rm

find . -name "*.html"|xargs rm

# when using a backtick
rm `find . -name "*.html"`

Delete files with whitespace in filename (e.g. "hello 2001")

find . -name "*.c" -print0|xargs -0 rm -rf

Show limits on command-line length

xargs --show-limits
# Output from my Ubuntu:
# Your environment variables take up 3653 bytes
# POSIX upper limit on argument length (this system): 2091451
# POSIX smallest allowable upper limit on argument length (all systems): 4096
# Maximum length of command we could actually use: 2087798
# Size of command buffer we are actually using: 131072
# Maximum parallelism (--max-procs must be no greater): 2147483647

Move files to folder

find . -name "*.bak" -print 0|xargs -0 -I {} mv {} ~/old

# or
find . -name "*.bak" -print 0|xargs -0 -I file mv file ~/old

Move first 100th files to a directory (e.g. d1)

ls |head -100|xargs -I {} mv {} d1

Parallel

time echo {1..5} |xargs -n 1 -P 5 sleep

# a lot faster than:
time echo {1..5} |xargs -n1 sleep

Copy all files from A to B

find /dir/to/A -type f -name "*.py" -print 0| xargs -0 -r -I file cp -v -p file --target-directory=/path/to/B

# v: verbose|
# p: keep detail (e.g. owner)

With sed

ls |xargs -n1 -I file sed -i '/^Pos/d' filename

Add the file name to the first line of file

ls |sed 's/.txt//g'|xargs -n1 -I file sed -i -e '1 i\>file\' file.txt

Count all files

ls |xargs -n1 wc -l

Turn output into a single line

ls -l| xargs

Count files within directories

echo mso{1..8}|xargs -n1 bash -c 'echo -n "$1:"; ls -la "$1"| grep -w 74 |wc -l' --
# "--" signals the end of options and display further option processing

Count lines in all file, also count total lines

ls|xargs wc -l

Xargs and grep

cat grep_list |xargs -I{} grep {} filename

Xargs and sed (replace all old ip address with new ip address under /etc directory)

grep -rl '192.168.1.111' /etc | xargs sed -i 's/192.168.1.111/192.168.2.111/g'