Good Habit #7: Use xargs outside of find

Use the xargs tool as a filter for making good use of output culled from the find command. The general precept is that a find run provides a list of files that match some criteria. This list is passed on to xargs, which then runs some other useful command with that list of files as arguments, as in the following example:

Listing 1. Example of the classic use of the xargs tool

~ $ find some-file-criteria some-file-path | \ > xargs some-great-command-that-needs-filename-arguments

However, do not think of xargs as just a helper for find; it is one of those underutilized tools that, when you get into the habit of using it, you want to try on everything, including the following uses.

Passing a space-delimited list

In its simplest invocation, xargs is like a filter that takes as input a list (with each member on a single line). The tool puts those members on a single space-delimited line:

Listing 2. Example of output from the xargs tool

~ $ xargs a b c Control-D a b c ~ $

You can send the output of any tool that outputs file names through xargs to get a list of arguments for some other tool that takes file names as an argument, as in the following example:

Listing 3. Example of using of the xargs tool

~/tmp $ ls -1 | xargs December_Report.pdf README a archive.tar mkdirhier.sh ~/tmp $ ls -1 | xargs file December_Report.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3 README: ASCII text a: directory archive.tar: POSIX tar archive mkdirhier.sh: Bourne shell script text executable ~/tmp $

The xargs command is useful for more than passing file names. Use it any time you need to filter text into a single line:

Listing 4. Example of good habit #7: Using the xargs tool to filter text into a single line

~/tmp $ ls -l | xargs -rw-r--r-- 7 joe joe 12043 Jan 27 20:36 December_Report.pdf -rw-r--r-- 1 \ root root 238 Dec 03 08:19 README drwxr-xr-x 38 joe joe 354082 Nov 02 \ 16:07 a -rw-r--r-- 3 joe joe 5096 Dec 14 14:26 archive.tar -rwxr-xr-x 1 \ joe joe 3239 Sep 30 12:40 mkdirhier.sh ~/tmp $

Be cautious using xargs
 
Technically, a rare situation occurs in which you could get into trouble using xargs. By default, the end-of-file string is an underscore (_); if that character is sent as a single input argument, everything after it is ignored. As a precaution against this, use the -e flag, which, without arguments, turns off the end-of-file string completely.