Comments on: Using xargs

By: T.J. Crowder

T.J. Crowder — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:12:24 +0000

You’ll run into trouble with find / -name *.mp3 -type f -print | xargs tar -cvzf mp3s.tar.gz if your filenames have any spaces in them. Try changing -print to -print0 and adding -0 to the xargs command.

By: Brendon

Brendon — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:11:09 +0000

using xargs + tar is a bad idea. Use tar -T, pax, etc instead. You’ll get into trouble with xargs.

By: ZZTech

ZZTech — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 18:39:40 +0000

Be a bit careful of the -c option on tar with xargs – it will restart the tar archive if the argument list (the ls command) is long enough (and you won’t get everything in the tar file that you expect). You can easily avoid this by using the ‘r’ (append) option with tar, though. (You can see http://zztools.blogspot.com for an example).

By: Stefan

Stefan — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:21 +0000

Here is the latest trick I did with xargs:

locate .htaccess |xargs cat |more

What it does is cat every .htaccess file one screen at a time. I needed to do this because I was in search of a rewrite rule that I couldn’t find.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:51:24 +0000

In the following example I am listing all files, then using the first xargs statement I am filtering them by search string then in the second xargs statement I am copying them to a new location. The reason for the double xargs is to get around the problem of: Argument list too long.

ls -1|xargs grep -l “search string”|xargs -n1 -I{} cp “{}” /home/newlocation