Shell Programming and Scripting

hi ,

can anyone help me by saying why we use xargs.. is it acing like a place holder..?

thanks,

Krips.

xargs allows you to use the output of one command as the arguments (not input) to another command, sort of like backticks, but with some additional twists. For one thing, if the command line is too long, xargs will take care of chopping it up into multiple invocations of the requested program. This alone is often a good reason to use xargs if the list of arguments can be very long.

Code:

ls -l `find / -print` # throws "Command line too long" error
find / -print | xargs ls -l  # invokes ls -l multiple times, on as many arguments as can be handled at once

(Of course, this is stupid if you have find -ls; but some don't. Anyway, it's just an example.)

Rather than using say a "-exec" switch with find, lets say you did a "-exec rm {} \;" for example... and your find comes up with 10,000 files. It means you've executed rm 10,000 times. xargs will provide as many arguments as "rm" can handle at once.. eg "rm file1 file2 file3... etc", so essentially you may have executed rm say 5,000 times, rather than 10,000.

okay.. thanks everyone... i got it clear..