Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

Passing stdout as a parameter using xargs

The xargs command is used to build and execute a command line from a standard input. Commands such as cp, echo, rm, wc, and so on, don't take input from a standard input or redirected output from another command. In such commands, we can use xargs to provide an input as an output of another command. The syntax is as follows:

xargs [option]

Some of options are explained in the following table:

Option	Description
-a file	This reads items from a file instead of stdin
-0, --null	Inputs are null-terminated instead of whitespace
-t, --verbose	Prints a command line on a standard output before executing
--show-limits	This displays the limit on the length of the command line imposed by OS
-P max-procs ...