xargs

xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute command lines from standard input.

Commands such as grep and awk can accept the standard input as a parameter, or argument by using a pipe.

However, others such as cp and echo disregard the standard input stream and rely solely on the arguments found after the command.

Additionally, under the Linux kernel before version 2.6.23, and under many other Unix-like systems, arbitrarily long lists of parameters cannot be passed to a command, so xargs breaks the list of arguments into sublists small enough to be acceptable.

See also

• File system
• Linux
• Unix
• Unix-like

External links

• xargs @ Wikipedia