Okay, I just had to share this one.
I have a process I normally have to do a few times a month that moves files
from one directory into a dated storage dir. Wouldn't be a hard problem but
the directory grows longer than can be used by simple argument expansion.
So we use a ls piped to grep and hand off to xargs. Problem was that due to
the normal usage of mv being "mv source dest" I had to use xargs -i to get
mv happy.
ls | grep TXT | xargs -i mv {} dest/
Well today when I tried yet again to get xargs to place more than one item
in the source section of the mv, I ran across an interesting solution that
I didn't think about. I had fixated on making xargs do all the work that I
didn't think about what could I do differently with mv to get the problem
solved. It seems cp and mv both support a --target-directory option that
lets you put the dest argument before the sources, and then you can turn
xargs loose to do it's normal operation.
ls | grep TXT | xargs mv --target-directory=dest/
This allows xargs to pack as many source files into each command as it can,
instead of the original that ran mv for every source file. Sped up the run
time by several minutes.
Just a little bit of reinforcement that occasionally when you are banging
your head on a problem one way, you might need to look at the other parts
to see if they can help you out.
--
Steven Critchfield [email protected]
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