* Kapil Hari Paranjape <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2008-06-07
> On Sat, 07 Jun 2008, Masatran, R. Deepak wrote:
> > Aren't
> >
> > xargs foo
> >
> > and
> >
> > xargs -i foo {}
> >
> > supposed to be identical? Why do they act different?
>
> Because they are not identical!
>
> The first takes the white-space separated words from standard input
> and assigns them as ARG1, ARG2, ....
> and runs foo with _all_ these arguments.
>
> The second takes _each_ white-space separated word from standard
> input and runs foo with ARG1 set to that word.
Eureka! I scanned the man page again and found a switch "-l" which forces
each input argument to be processed separately. Therefore, it is
xargs -l foo
that is equivalent to
xargs -i foo {}
Now onwards, I will always use "-l" with XArgs. Isn't XArgs the greatest
command on Unix!!
--
Masatran, R. Deepak <http://research.iiit.ac.in/~masatran/>
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