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                 |  | UGU: Unix Guru Universe - Unix Tip #4281- November 30, 2012
 -  Home : Help
 : Today's Tip Unix Tip #4281- November 30, 2012
 
 
POWER OF XARGS 
Don't over look the power of xargs. By default
 in some flavors of unix, the command line is
 limited to roughly 20K bytes.
 
 Some directory lists can well exceed that.
 
 Secondly, performance using
 
 % find /tmp -name foo -exec rm \;
 
 will fork the rm command for every file it
 finds. If this were to return 1000s of files
 you get rm forked 1000s of times.
 
 But,
 
 % find /tmp -name foo |xargs rm
 
 while getting the same effect, rm is forked
 with a long list of files, and thus system
 overhead is reduced, and the command runs
 faster, and system impact is reduced.
 
 This is also important if you have list of
 files produced by
 
 % find {blah} > listfile
 
 Once you edit your list to remove those
 files you really want to keep, then
 
 % cat listfile| xargs rm
 
 Will remove all the files in the file. While
 % rm $(cat listfile) will
 
 Fail if listfile is greater than ~20K
 
 
 
 NOTE: All tips provided are USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Tips are submitted
by various unix admins around the globe. UGU suggest you read and
test each tip in a non-volitile environment before placing into
production.
 
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