On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 5:50 PM, Morgan Weetman <mweet...@redhat.com> wrote: > > Hi Peng, > > if you read the man page the behaviour is defined (note the "one or more > times"): > > --------------------- > xargs reads items > from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected > with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes > the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial- > arguments followed by items read from standard input > --------------------- > > So basically your command below will call 'ls' once with no arguments and > display the contents of the current directory
But wouldn't be better to make this zero more times? Consider the following example, intuitively, one just want to use ls to display all the files. When there are no files, a nature choice is to display nothing. However, this definition of xargs calls ls once which will display all the files in the current directory. I think that this default behavior is not very reasonable, I'd expect at least there should be an option to disable it. find -type f | xargs ls -- Regards, Peng
