Is it possible to make xargs
use only newline as separator? (in bash on Linux and OS X if that matters)
I know -0
can be used, but it's PITA as not every command supports NUL-delimited output.
Something along the lines of
alias myxargs='perl -p -e "s/\n/\0/;" | xargs -0'
cat nonzerofile | myxargs command
should work.
tr
is faster both for the cpu and for your fingers.
Apr 23, 2015 at 20:09
GNU xargs (default on Linux; install findutils
from MacPorts on OS X to get it) supports -d
which lets you specify a custom delimiter for input, so you can do
ls *foo | xargs -d '\n' -P4 foo
alias xxargs="xargs -d '\n'"
in my bashrc. So I can just do things like this: grep -IRl foo | xxargs sed -i s/foo/bar/g
tr
is a good idea too.
Dec 3, 2012 at 18:36
brew install findutils
and gxargs
was exactly what I needed on OS X, thanks.
Mar 22, 2016 at 19:00
With Bash, I generally prefer to avoid xargs for anything the least bit tricky, in favour of while-read loops. For your question, while read -ar LINE; do ...; done
does the job (remember to use array syntax with LINE, e.g., ${LINE[@]}
for the whole line). This doesn't need any trickery: by default read uses just \n
as the line terminator character.
I should post a question on SO about the pros & cons of xargs vs. while-read loops... done!
xargs -n1 -d'\n'
, and not the whole xargs
.
Apr 23, 2015 at 20:12
xargs -n$N
as well with only a bit of extra scripting.
May 5, 2015 at 16:33
read
options, like reading more words in separate variables, or change delimiter with IFS=' '
.
Mar 13, 2017 at 14:14
$IFS
(normally whitespace), and concatenating the array with ${LINE[*]}
or ${LINE[@]}
does not restore that original whitespace. Using while read -r line; do ...
is better for most situations, and lowercase variables avoid conflict with built-in/environment variables.
$ echo "1\n2 3\n4 5 6" | xargs -L1 echo "#"
# 1
# 2 3
# 4 5 6
echo
is xarg
's default command, you can just do echo "..." | xargs -L1
.
Nov 23, 2022 at 10:59
please use the -d option of xargs
--delimiter=delim, -d delim
Input items are terminated by the specified character. The specified delimiter may be a single character, a C-style character escape such as \n, or an octal or hexadecimal escape code. Octal and hexadecimal escape codes are understood as for the printf command. Multibyte characters are not supported. When processing the input, quotes and backslash are not special; every character in the input is taken literally. The -d option disables any end-of-file string, which is treated like any other argument. You can use this option when the input consists of simply newline-separated items, although it is almost always better to design your program to use --null where this is possible.
Example:
$ echo 'for arg in "$@"; do echo "arg: <$arg>"; done' > show_args
$ printf "a a\nb b\nc c\n"
a a
b b
c c
$ printf "a a\nb b\nc c\n" | xargs -d '\n' bash show_args
arg: <a a>
arg: <b b>
arg: <c c>
What about cat file | xargs | sed 's/ /\n/ig'
this will convert spaces to newlines, using standard Linux bash tools.
file
contains spaces and newlines, then the result of this command will make it impossible to distinguish between them, which seems to be going in the opposite direction of what this question asks for
Sep 24, 2018 at 19:07
find -print0 -name \*.foo -maxdepth 1 | xargs -0 -P4
is way too much to type compared withls *.foo | xargs -P4
.