xargs is SHINY!

[sbc_compliant]

Found out some more today, during the instructor's tangent, that xargs is even more nifty than I thought.

To wit, some programs just don't take input from STDIN. This is one of the reasons for which xargs was created.

• example:

  
  find foo bar baz | xargs ls -lad
  This allows ls, which normally cannot be passed parameters, to only operate on the output of the find, instead of the local directory. Also, I found out that the -d flag for ls ensures that the directories are not expanded.



• example:

  
  find foo -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lad
  This, like above, allows ls operate on the output of the find. Additionally, the -print0 argument on the find makes the find able to read filenames with whitespace. This is done by swapping in a zero for the \s. Along with this, the -0 flag on xargs allows it to read this modified output.