Goldbolt: /* Usage */

2019-12-18T19:12:50Z

‎Usage

Goldbolt: Created page with " xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute commands from standard input. It converts input from standard input into arguments t..."

2019-12-18T19:12:05Z

Created page with " xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute commands from standard input. It converts input from standard input into arguments t..."

New page

xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute commands from standard input. It converts input from standard input into arguments to a command.

Some commands such as grep and awk can take input either as command-line arguments or from the standard input. However, others such as cp and echo can only take input as arguments, which is why xargs is used instead.

=Usage=

Pipe output from cat and grep into sed to replace "foo" with "bar" within file.txt:

cat foobar.txt | grep bar | xargs -I '{}' sed 's/foo/{}/g' file.txt

Randomly shuffles output of grep of "us1234.thing.txt" and only prints up to the first instance of "." due to awk:

ls /dir1/dir2/ |grep us |awk -F "." '{print $1}' | xargs shuf -n1 -e

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
      cat foobar.txt | grep bar | xargs -I '{}' sed 's/foo/{}/g' file.txt
-Randomly shuffles output of grep of "us1234.thing.txt" and only prints up to the first instance of "." due to awk:
+Randomly shuffles output of ls and grep of "/dir1/dir2/us1234.thing.txt" and only prints up to the first instance of "." due to awk:
      ls /dir1/dir2/ |grep us |awk -F "." '{print $1}' | xargs shuf -n1 -e

Xargs - Revision history

Goldbolt: /* Usage */

Goldbolt: Created page with " xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute commands from standard input. It converts input from standard input into arguments t..."