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Understanding Xargs

 
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Old 12-26-2017
Understanding Xargs
I'm struggling to understand the man page entry about xargs in conjunction with the option -I. It states:

Quote:
Execute utility for each input line, replacing one or more occur-
rences of replstr in up to replacements (or 5 if no -R flag is
specified) arguments to utility with the entire line of input
And the description reads:

Quote:
The xargs utility reads space, tab, newline and end-of-file delimited
strings from the standard input and executes utility with the strings as
arguments.
Am I correct interpreting that as the fact that if no specified otherwise xargs -I can pass to a command following it no more than 5 arguments (a.k.a "strings") each of them containing unlimited number of occurrences of the data to be replaced using that command?

Furthermore what is a string in UNIX?

Example:
pass a list of highest level objects of current directory to some command

Code:
ls . | xargs some_command

Does ls return one string comprising multiple lines? How many arguments that passes for? Or is one line = 1 string? 1 argument?

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