Iam trying to use xargs command using shell pipes and not able to understand how to control and use command line arguments. For example I'd like to find out all *.c file located in 100s of sub-directories and move them to another directory called ~/old.src. How do I use command line args with xargs to achieve the same?

xargs command is designed to construct argument lists and invoke other utility. xargs reads items from the standard input or pipes, delimited by blanks or newlines, and executes the command one or more times with any initial-arguments followed by items read from standard input. Blank lines on the standard input are ignored.

xargs is more safer and easy to use

xargs functionality can be achived using the backquote feature of shell. But, it offers more options. It can deal with blanks or special characters in file names easily. It is often used with find, grep and other commands.

xargs examples

For example following example will print 1 2 3 4 using xargs (echo command is default)
$ echo 1 2 3 4 | xargs echo
OR
$ echo 1 2 3 4 | xargs
You can force xargs to use at most max-args arguments per command line. For example following will use first two argument per command:
$ echo 1 2 3 4 | xargs -n 2
Find all .bak files in or below the current directory and delete them.
$ find . -name "*.bak" -type f -print | xargs /bin/rm -f

{} as the argument list marker

{} is the default argument list marker. You need to use {} this with various command which take more than two arguments at a time. For example mv command need to know the file name. The following will find all .bak files in or below the current directory and move them to ~/.old.files directory:
$ find . -name "*.bak" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} mv {} ~/old.files
You can rename {} to something else. In the following example {} is renamed as file. This is more readable as compare to previous example:
$ find . -name "*.bak" -print0 | xargs -0 -I file mv file ~/old.files
Where,

Dealing file names with blank spaces and newline

The following will work incorrectly if there are any filenames containing newlines or spaces (it will find out all .mp3 file located in current directory and play them using mplayer):
$ find . -iname "*.mp3" -print | xargs mplayer
To get rid of this problem use -0 option:
$ find . -iname "*.mp3" -print0 | xargs -0 -I mp3file mplayer mp3file
To find out all *.c file located in 100s of subdirectories and move them to another directory called ~/old.src, use:
$ find /path/to/dir -iname "*.c" -print0 | xargs -0 -I file mv file ~/old.src

Avoiding errors and resource hungry problems with xargs and find combo

To copy all media files to another location called /bakup/iscsi, you can use cp as follows:
$ cp -r -v -p /share/media/mp3/ /backup/iscsi/mp3
However, cp command may fail if an error occurs such as if the number of files is too large for the cp command to handle. xargs in combination with find can handle such operation nicely. xargs is more resource efficient and will not halt with an error:

Please note that all of the above commands are tested with GNU/xargs version. BSD and UNIX xargs command may not have options such as -r. Please refer to your local xargs man page for further info:
man xargs

xargs is a very powerful command that takes output of a command and pass it as argument of another command. Following are some practical examples on how to use xargs effectively.

Xargs Example 1:

When you are trying to delete too many files using rm, you may get error message: /bin/rm Argument list too long – Linux. Use xargs to avoid this problem.

# find ~ -name ‘*.log’ -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

Xargs Example 2:

Get a list of all the *.conf file under /etc/. There are different ways to get the same result. Following example is only to demonstrate the use of xargs. The output of the find command in this example is passed to the ls –l one by one using xargs.

# find /etc -name "*.conf" | xargs ls –l

Xargs Example 3:

If you have a file with list of URLs that you would like to download, you can use xargs as shown below.

# cat url-list.txt | xargs wget –c

Xargs Example 4:

Find out all the jpg images and archive it.

# find / -name *.jpg -type f -print | xargs tar -cvzf images.tar.gz

Xargs Example 5:

Copy all the images to an external hard-drive.

# ls *.jpg | xargs -n1 -i cp {} /external-hard-drive/directory

Things you (probably) didn’t know about xargs

26 June 2011 – Bangalore, India

If you’ve spent any amount of time at a Unix command line you’ve probably already seen xargs. In case you haven’t, xargs is a command used to execute commands based on arguments from standard input.

Common use cases

I often see xargs used in combination with find in order to do something with the list of files returned by find.

Pedantic note: As people have correctly pointed out on Twitter and on Hacker News, find is a very powerful command and it has built in flags such as -execand -delete that you can often use instead of piping to xargs. However people either don’t know about the options to find, forget how to invoke -exec with it’s archaic syntax, or prefer the simplicity of xargs. There are also performance implications to the various choices. I should write a follow up post on find.

Contrived examples warning: I needed something simple examples that would not detract from the topic. This is the best I could do given the time I had.Patches are welcome :)

Recursively find all Python files and count the number of lines
find . -name '*.py' | xargs wc -l

Recursively find all Emacs backup files and remove them
find . -name '*~' | xargs rm

Recursively find all Python files and search them for the word ‘import’
find . -name '*.py' | xargs grep 'import'

Handling files or folders with spaces in the name

One problem with the above examples is that it does not correctly handle files or directories with a space in the name. This is because xargs by default will split on any white-space character. A quick solution to this is to tell find to delimit results with NUL () characters (by supplying -print0 to find), and to tell xargs to split the input on NUL characters as well (-0).

Remove backup files recursively even if they contain spaces
find . -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Security note: filenames can often contain more than just spaces.

Placement of the arguments

In the examples above xargs reads all non-white-space elements from standard input and concatenates them into the given command line before executing it. This alone is very useful in many circumstances. Sometimes however you might want to insert the arguments into the middle of a command. The -I flag to xargs takes a string that will be replaced with the supplied input before the command is executed. A common choice is %.

Move all backup files somewhere else
find . -name '*~' -print 0 | xargs -0 -I % cp % ~/backups

Maximum command length

Sometimes the list of arguments piped to xargs would cause the resulting command line to exceed the maximum length allowed by the system. You can find this limit with

getconf ARG_MAX

In order to avoid hitting the system limit, xargs has its own limit to the maximum length of the resulting command. If the supplied arguments would cause the invoked command to exceed this built in limit, xargs will split the input and invoke the command repeatedly. This limit defaults to 4096, which can be significantly lower than ARG_MAX on modern systems. You can override xargs’s limit with the -s flag. This will be particularly important when you are dealing with a large source tree.

Operating on subset of arguments at a time

You might be dealing with commands that can only accept 1 or maybe 2 arguments at a time. For example the diff command operates on two files at a time. The -n flag to xargs specifies how many arguments at a time to supply to the given command. The command will be invoked repeatedly until all input is exhausted. Note that on the last invocation you might get less than the desired number of arguments if there is insufficient input. Let’s simply use xargs to break up the input into 2 arguments per line

$ echo {0..9} | xargs -n 2

0 1
2 3
4 5
6 7
8 9

In addition to running based on a specified number of arguments at time you can also invoke a command for each line of input at a time with -L 1. You can of course use an arbitrary number of lines a time, but 1 is most common. Here is how you might diff every git commit against its parent.

git log --format="%H %P" | xargs -L 1 git diff

Executing commands in parallel

You might be using xargs to invoke a compute intensive command for every line of input. Wouldn’t it be nice if xargs allowed you to take advantage of the multiple cores in your machine? That’s what -P is for. It allows xargs to invoke the specified command multiple times in parallel. You might use this for example to run multiple ffmpeg encodes in parallel. However I’m just going to show you yet another contrived example.

Parallel sleep

$ time echo {1..5} | xargs -n 1 -P 5 sleep

real    0m5.013s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m0.014s

Sequential sleep

$ time echo {1..5} | xargs -n 1 sleep

real    0m15.022s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.015s

If you are interested in using xargs for parallel computation also consider GNUparallel. xargs has the advantage of being installed by default on most systems, and easily available on BSD and OS X, but parallel has some really nice features.

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xargs: How To Control and Use Command Line Arguments

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