Xargs

<yambe:breadcrumb>Shell scripting</yambe:breadcrumb>

xargs

'xargs' is very useful for running some command using single line from input at a time as parameter. For example to compress all files using gzip in a folder one can use:

ls -1 | xargs gzip

In this case if the folder has three files 'a.txt', 'b.txt' and 'c.txt' then following three commands would run due to xargs command above:

gzip a.txt
gzip b.txt
gzip c.txt

If the argument is not expected at end of command then an input pattern can be specified with -I (such as {}) which can be replaced with filename. For example to move all files that start with digit to a folder temp use:

ls -1 | grep '^[0-9].*' | xargs -I {} mv {} temp