Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Second Edition

Playing with xargs

We use pipes to redirect stdout (standard output) of a command to stdin (standard input) of another command. For example:

cat foo.txt | grep "test"

Some of the commands accept data as command-line arguments rather than a data stream through stdin (standard input). In that case, we cannot use pipes to supply data through command-line arguments.

We should try alternate methods. xargs is a command that is very helpful in handling standard input data to the command-line argument conversions. It can manipulate stdin and convert to command-line arguments for the specified command. Also, xargs can convert any one-line or multiple-line text inputs into other formats, such as multiple lines (specified number of columns) or a single line ...