[Ilugc] XArgs
- From: kapil@xxxxxxxxxxx (Kapil Hari Paranjape)
- Date: Sat Jun 7 07:08:15 2008
Hello,
On Sat, 07 Jun 2008, Masatran, R. Deepak wrote:
Aren't
xargs foo
and
xargs -i foo {}
supposed to be identical? Why do they act different?
Because they are not identical!
The first takes the white-space separated words from standard input
and assigns them as ARG1, ARG2, ....
and runs foo with _all_ these arguments.
The second takes _each_ white-space separated word from standard
input and runs foo with ARG1 set to that word.
Just to get the pipeline out of the way do the following
ls / > /tmp/list
This produces a file with one file name on each line.
(Note below that the default command run by xargs is "echo")
Then run
xarg -a /tmp/list
this produces the entire list on one line (which will be wrapped
around if your terminal is set to wrap mode).
On the other hand
xarg -a /tmp/list -i \{\}
produces a copy of /tmp/list
Kapil.
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