Since only your interactive shell knows about aliases, why not just run the alias without forking out through xargs? find . -iname ‘.#*’ -print0 | while read -r -d ” i; do foobar “$i”; done If you’re sure that your filenames don’t have newlines in them (ick, why would they?), you can simplify this to … Read more
The following command constructs the move command with xargs, replaces the second occurrence of ‘.’ with ‘.bar.’, then executes the commands with bash, working on mac OSX. ls *.txt | xargs -I {} echo mv {} foo/{} | sed ‘s/\./.bar./2’ | bash
Use find combined with xargs. find . -name ‘file*’ -size 0 -print0 | xargs -0 rm You avoid to start rm for every file.
Don’t listen to all of them. 🙂 Just look at this example: echo argument1 argument2 argument3 | xargs -l bash -c ‘echo this is first:$0 second:$1 third:$2’ Output will be: this is first:argument1 second:argument2 third:argument3
From the xargs man page: This manual page documents the GNU version of xargs. xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial- arguments followed by … Read more
Do not make the mistake of doing this: sh -c “grep ABC {} > {}.out” This will break under a lot of conditions, including funky filenames and is impossible to quote right. Your {} must always be a single completely separate argument to the command to avoid code injection bugs. What you need to do, … Read more
Exporting the function should do it (untested): export -f echo_var seq -f “n%04g” 1 100 | xargs -n 1 -P 10 -I {} bash -c ‘echo_var “$@”‘ _ {} You can use the builtin printf instead of the external seq: printf “n%04g\n” {1..100} | xargs -n 1 -P 10 -I {} bash -c ‘echo_var “$@”‘ … Read more
You can combine all of that into a single find command: find . -iname “*foobar*” -exec cp — “{}” ~/foo/bar \; This will handle filenames and directories with spaces in them. You can use -name to get case-sensitive results. Note: The — flag passed to cp prevents it from processing files starting with – as … Read more
For GNU xargs, you can use the -r or –no-run-if-empty option: –no-run-if-empty -r If the standard input does not contain any nonblanks, do not run the command. Normally, the command is run once even if there is no input. This option is a GNU extension. The BSD version of xargs, which is used on macOS, … Read more
The xargs command takes white space characters (tabs, spaces, new lines) as delimiters. You can narrow it down only for the new line characters (‘\n’) with -d option like this: ls *.mp3 | xargs -d ‘\n’ mplayer It works only with GNU xargs. For MacOS: ls *.mp3 | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 mplayer … Read more