What is xargs?

[Mark J. Reed]

> On 2007-10-12, Hall Nation wrote:
> > I am new to cygwin/X.
> >
> > Using the above setup at the workplace..
> > I need to know about the xargs command. What does it
> > do ?

As Gary said, the "man" (short for "manual") command is your friend.

It's also important to note that not all commands whose name starts
with "x" have anything to do with X the graphics system.  In the case
of "xargs", the "x" represents the operation that conceptually turns a
vertical list of items into a horizontal list of command-line
arguments.

So if you have a file named "lines.txt" whose contents are as follows:

line1
line2
line3

Then if you type this at the bash prompt:

xargs mycommand <lines.txt

The xargs program will turn around and run the following command on
your behalf, as if you'd typed it instead:

mycommand line1 line2 line3

-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@mail.com>

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