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Questions tagged [xargs]

xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute command lines from standard input.

xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute command lines from standard input. Under the Linux kernel before version 2.6.23, arbitrarily long lists of parameters could not be passed to a command, so xargs breaks the list of arguments into sublists small enough to be acceptable.

xargs often covers the same functionality as the backquote(`) feature of many shells, but is more flexible and often also safer, especially if there are blanks or special characters in the input. It is a good companion for commands that output long lists of files like find, locate and grep, but only if you use -0, since xargs without -0 deals badly with file names containing ', " and space.

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GNU parallel not working at all

I have been trying to use GNU parallel for some time, but I have never been able to get it to function at all! For example, running (in a non-empty directory!): ls | parallel echo # Outputs single new line ls | parallel echo echo echo #…
WaelJ
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Is there a grep equivalent for find's -print0 and xargs's -0 switches?

I often want to write commands like this (in zsh, if it's relevant): find | \ grep stringinfilenamesIwant | \ grep -v stringinfilesnamesIdont | \ xargs dosomecommand (or more complex combinations of greps) In recent…
Andrew Ferrier
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Getting error "xargs unterminated quote" when tried to print the number of lines in terminal

I want to get the number of lines in my application. I am using this code: find . "(" -name "*.m" -or -name "*.h" ")" -print | xargs wc -l It is working fine in other applications but for one of my applications it is giving the error "xargs…
Lena
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How to stop xargs on first error?

I have an pages.txt file with 100 URLs inside. I want to check them one by one and fail on the first problem. This is what I'm doing: cat pages.txt | xargs -n 1 curl --silent \ --output /dev/null --write-out '%{url_effective}: %{http_code}\n';…
yegor256
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ls: terminated by signal 13 when using xargs

I'm using the following command to delete four largest size files in a folder: find "/var/www/site1/" -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs ls -1S | head -n 4 | xargs -d '\n' rm -f It works fine, but from time to time throws broken pipe error: xargs: ls:…
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How can I pass all arguments with xargs in middle of command in linux

I want to pass all the files as a single argument on Linux but I am not able to do that. This is working ls | sort -n | xargs -i pdftk {} cat output combinewd2.pdf This passes a single argument per command, but I want all in one command.
user2027303
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When to use xargs when piping?

I am new to bash and I am trying to understand the use of xargs, which is still not clear for me. For example: history | grep ls Here I am searching for the command ls in my history. In this command, I did not use xargs and it worked fine. find…
Sara Hamad
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how to output file names surrounded with quotes in SINGLE line?

I would like to output the list of items in a folder in the folowing way: "filename1" "filename2" "file name with spaces" "foldername" "folder name with spaces" In other words, item names must be in a single line, surrounded with quotes (single or…
Ana
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Is there a way to uninstall multiple packages with pip?

I am attempting to remove all of the installed "pyobjc-framework"-prefixed packages. I have tried the following: % pip freeze | grep pyobjc-framework | xargs pip uninstall but this barfs because each pip uninstall requires confirmation (perhaps a…
wh1tney
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Using grep to search for hex strings in a file

Does anyone know how to get grep, or similar tool, to retrieve offsets of hex strings in a file? I have a bunch of hexdumps (from GDB) that I need to check for strings and then run again and check if the value has changed. I have tried hexdump and…
user650649
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xargs split at newlines not spaces

here is my problem in short $ echo 'for i in $@; do echo arg: $i; done; echo DONE' > /tmp/test.sh $ echo "ac\nbc\ncc\n" | xargs bash /tmp/test.sh arg: ac arg: bc arg: cc DONE Which is what i expect, but $ echo "ac s\nbc s\ncc s\n" | xargs -d \n…
fakedrake
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Is it possible to pipe the results of FIND to a COPY command CP?

Is it possible to pipe the results of find to a COPY command cp? Like this: find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | cp Destination Directory Seeking, I always find this kind of formula such as from this post: find . -name "*.pdf" -type f -exec cp {}…
Paul
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Batch renaming files in command line and Xargs

So, I have the following structure: . .. a.png b.png c.png I ran a command to resize them ls | xargs -I xx convert xx -resize xx.jpg Now my dir looks like this . .. a.png.jpg a.png b.png.jpg b.png c.png.jpg c.png The firs question is, how do i…
Cripto
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Understanding the UNIX command xargs

I'm pretty much confused on this. Need some clarifications. Example 1 : pgrep string | xargs ps Example 2 : find . | xargs grep whatever From Example 1, I gather it's this way: Search for a "string" which is part of name of running process and…
halluc1nati0n
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How can I use aliased commands with xargs?

I have the following alias in my .aliases: alias gi grep -i and I want to look for foo case-insensitively in all the files that have the string bar in their name: find -name \*bar\* | xargs gi foo This is what I get: xargs: gi: No such file or…
Nathan Fellman
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