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This video
is about xargs.

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So xargs is used to build
commands dynamically from the standard input.

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Normally it gets its input from a pipe and it
allows commands that don't support piped input to work with

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other commands. Anyway, it's a little bit like what we
have seen in find exec, but xarc is is faster

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and more flexible than find exec for the simple
reason that xarcs works on other commands as well.

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If multiple arguments are passed through
a command that supports one single argument

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only, you can use N1 to
process the arguments one by one.

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So that means that you are
not going to use echolisalinda, lori,

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pipexargs user@ but echo lisa, linda,
laurie, pipe xarx n1userad there are

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some commands that are a
bit problematic with xargs like ls.

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So for that reason don't try
to use xargs together with ls.

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Better use find instead. Let's
have a look at some examples.

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So for the first example I'm
going to create a couple of files.

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Let's use touch
one ten log.

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So I now created
a couple of files that

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have the extension log
and just to explain how

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it works, I'm using
LFS log on xargs RM

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f and the result
all these cells are gone.

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Now this example is not so very
powerful because you might wonder why didn't

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you just use rmstar log? And
yeah, that would have worked as well.

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But to understand how xargs is taking
input from a pipe, it's useful because

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normally RM f needs an argument and
this argument is provided dynamically by xargs.

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Another example, let's
do a sudo now.

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You know what,
let's do something else.

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Ddif is
dev0of is big

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file 1bs
is 125m, only

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24. That
also works.

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So what is this command doing?
Well, this command is creating a

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file with the name bigfile1
and oops, I did it wrong.

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I forgot to specify how many blocks it
should copy. But hey, it did create a file

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with the name big file1 and as you
can see, this big file1 is really big.

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Now I'm going to use
find.type f size +100m followed by

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xarcs. Well, on the slide
I'm using MV to move it,

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but here I better use
RM F to remove it.

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As a result, we don't have bakefile
anymore. And let's do a quick df

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h to verify that I still
have 12 gigabytes available. Phew, that works.

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Now let's use another one
and this other one is

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echo linda lisa laurie 5
sudo xrgs we need sudo

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this time because I'm
going to create some users.

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N1 to user add sudo requires a sudo
password. It does give an error on user

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Linda because that user already existed. But
users Lisa and Lori have successfully been created.

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I can use a quick test to verify
using til n3 on etc passwd that's showing the

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last three lines in the passwd file showing
that the users have indeed been successfully created.

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That's
xargs.