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 that xargs should pass to the command at a time. For example, if you specify n 2, xargs will pass two arguments to the command at a time.
• p: This option prompts the user for confirmation before executing the command on each argument.
• I: This option specifies a placeholder string that will be replaced by each argument in the command. For example, if you specify I %, the % placeholder will be replaced by each argument in the command.

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.