The xargs
command is a powerful utility in Linux that allows you to execute a command on a list of arguments that are passed to it. It is commonly used in combination with other commands, such as find
, grep
, and ls
, to perform actions on multiple files or directories at once. In this article, we will show some examples of how to use the xargs
command for beginners.
Basic Syntax
The basic syntax of the xargs
command is as follows:
xargs [options] [command]
The xargs
command takes a list of arguments from standard input, and executes the specified command
on each argument in the list. By default, the xargs
command assumes that the list of arguments is separated by whitespace (spaces, tabs, or newlines).
For example, if you have a list of files in a file called files.txt
, you can use the xargs
command with the ls
command to display the list of files:
cat files.txt | xargs ls
This will read the list of files from the files.txt
file, and pass each file name as an argument to the ls
command, which will display the contents of the file.
Common Options
The xargs
command supports a number of options that allow you to customize its behavior. Some of the common options are:
n
: This option specifies the maximum number of arguments thatxargs
should pass to thecommand
at a time. For example, if you specifyn 2
,xargs
will pass two arguments to thecommand
at a time.p
: This option prompts the user for confirmation before executing thecommand
on each argument.I
: This option specifies a placeholder string that will be replaced by each argument in thecommand
. For example, if you specifyI %
, the%
placeholder will be replaced by each argument in thecommand
.
Examples
Here are some examples of how to use the xargs
command:
Find and Delete Files
You can use the xargs
command with the find
and rm
commands to find and delete files that match a certain pattern. For example, to find and delete all files ending with the .tmp
extension in the current directory, you can use the following command:
find . -name "*.tmp" | xargs rm
This will search for files with the .tmp
extension in the current directory and all its subdirectories, and pass the list of files to xargs
, which will pass each file to the rm
command, which will delete the file.
Grep and Output Matches
You can use the xargs
command with the grep
command to search for a pattern in multiple files and output the matching lines. For example, to search for the hello
pattern in all files in the current directory, you can use the following command:
find . -type f | xargs grep "hello"
This will search for files in the current directory, and pass the list of files to xargs
, which will pass each file to the grep
command, which will search for the hello
pattern in the file and output any matching lines.