Linux and Unix xargs command tutorial with examples
https://shapeshed.com/unix-xargs/
xargs
- command line for building an execution pipeline from standard input.
- reads items from standard input as separated by blanks and executes a command once for each argument.
echo 'one two three' | xargs mkdir
ls
one two three xargs vs exec
The find command supports the -exec option that allows arbitrary commands to be performed on found files. The following are equivalent.
find ./foo -type f -name "*.txt" -exec rm {} \;
find ./foo -type f -name "*.txt" | xargs rm
So which one is faster? Let’s compare a folder with 1000 files in it.
time find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec rm {} \;
0.35s user 0.11s system 99% cpu 0.467 total
time find ./foo -type f -name "*.txt" | xargs rm
0.00s user 0.01s system 75% cpu 0.016 total
Clearly using xargs is far more efficient. In fact several benchmarks suggest using xargs over exec {} is six times more efficient.
