Unix Tip: REPETITIVE TASKS WITH XARGS

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Unix Tip 3182 - October 23, 2009

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REPETITIVE TASKS WITH XARGS

Save yourself a lot of typing when you have to perform repetitive commands on a list of files. Put the list of files in a text file with one file per line ie: find . -name version.C > filename Then have xargs build a command line for each file in the list as follows:

cat filename |xargs -n 1 cp anotherfile

This will copy anotherfile over all the files listed in filename one at a time until the end of filename is reached.

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