Using xargs

For sometime now i have been trying to use the xargs command but it sometimes proves somewhat hard for me to understand but now i think i have got the hang of it. Here is a sample code to demonstrate how easy it really is.

% find . -maxdepth 1 -name ‘filesys*’ -print0 | xargs -0 -Ifil mv fil “thefile”

The various parts of the command are :

• .   : Represents the current directory.
• -maxdepth : Tells the find command to which depth should it recursively look for the search term. In this case its 1.
• -name : The name of the search term or item.
• -print0 : Note its “Zero” not O. This prints out the file matching the name. The 0 handles file names that have whitespaces in them. I think its always good to have them on.
• -0 : It also handles white space characters for you.
• -I : Temporarily store the currently matched file in the variable “fil”.
• mv : Rename the file represented by fil to ;
• the file. You can do without the double quotes.

Hope that helped.

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