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28.17. Dealing with Too Many Arguments

Historically, one of the more annoying things about the design of many UNIX tools was their inability to handle large numbers of arguments. For example, if you wanted to print several hundred files using lpr, you either had to pass them a few at a time, perhaps using wildcards on the command line to split the list up into shorter groups, or call lpr once per file, perhaps using find or a loop. One other method, which is still useful today, involves the use of xargs.

xargs is one of those Unix utilities that seems pretty useless when you first hear about it -- but turns into one of the handiest tools you can have.

Figure Go to http://examples.oreilly.com/upt3 for more information on: xargs

If your system doesn't already have xargs, be sure to install it from the web site.

xargs reads a group of arguments from its standard input, then runs a Unix command with that group of arguments. It keeps reading arguments and running the command until it runs out of arguments. The shell's backquotes (Section 28.14) do the same kind of thing, but they give all the arguments to the command at once. This can give you a Too many arguments error.

Here are some examples:

--JP and SJC



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