Linux
Intermediate
What is Xargs?
A command that builds and executes commands from standard input, useful for processing lists of items.
Xargs reads items from stdin and executes a command with those items as arguments. Example: find . -name "*.log" | xargs rm removes all .log files found. The -I flag enables placeholder substitution: echo file.txt | xargs -I {} cp {} {}.bak.
Useful flags include -P (parallel execution), -n (max arguments per command), -0 (null-delimited input for filenames with spaces). Xargs bridges tools that produce output with tools that accept arguments.