| XARGS(1) | General Commands Manual | XARGS(1) | 
xargs —
| xargs | [ -0oprt] [-Eeofstr] [-Ireplstr [-Rreplacements] [-Sreplsize]] [-Jreplstr] [-Lnumber] [-nnumber [-x]]
      [-Pmaxprocs]
      [-ssize]
      [utility [argument ...]] | 
xargs utility reads space, tab, newline and
  end-of-file delimited strings from the standard input and executes
  utility with the strings as arguments.
Any arguments specified on the command line are given to
    utility upon each invocation, followed by some number
    of the arguments read from the standard input of
    xargs. This is repeated until standard input is
    exhausted.
Spaces, tabs and newlines may be embedded in arguments using single (`` ' '') or double (``"'') quotes or backslashes (``\''). Single quotes escape all non-single quote characters, excluding newlines, up to the matching single quote. Double quotes escape all non-double quote characters, excluding newlines, up to the matching double quote. Any single character, including newlines, may be escaped by a backslash.
The options are as follows:
-0xargs to expect NUL (``\0'') characters as
      separators, instead of spaces and newlines. This is expected to be used in
      concert with the -print0 function in
      find(1).-E
    eofstr-I
    replstr-R
      flag is specified) arguments to utility with the
      entire line of input. The resulting arguments, after replacement is done,
      will not be allowed to grow beyond replsize (or 255
      if no -S flag is specified) bytes; this is
      implemented by concatenating as much of the argument containing
      replstr as possible, to the constructed arguments to
      utility, up to replsize bytes.
      The size limit does not apply to arguments to
      utility which do not contain
      replstr, and furthermore, no replacement will be
      done on utility itself. Implies
      -x.-J
    replstrxargs will use the
      data read from standard input to replace the first occurrence of
      replstr instead of appending that data after all
      other arguments. This option will not affect how many arguments will be
      read from input (-n), or the size of the
      command(s) xargs will generate
      (-s). The option just moves where those arguments
      will be placed in the command(s) that are executed. The
      replstr must show up as a distinct
      argument to xargs. It will
      not be recognized if, for instance, it is in the middle of a quoted
      string. Furthermore, only the first occurrence of the
      replstr will be replaced. For example, the following
      command will copy the list of files and directories which start with an
      uppercase letter in the current directory to
      destdir:
    
    /bin/ls -1d [A-Z]* | xargs -J %
      cp -rp % destdir-L
    number-n
    number-s option) exceeds the
      specified size or there are fewer than
      number arguments remaining for the last invocation
      of utility. The current default value for
      number is 5000.-oxargs to run an interactive application.-P
    maxprocs-py’ in the POSIX locale, causes the
      command to be executed, any other response causes it to be skipped. No
      commands are executed if the process is not attached to a terminal.-rxargs. The GNU version of
      xargs runs the utility
      argument at least once, even if xargs input is
      empty, and it supports a -r option to inhibit this
      behavior. The NetBSD version of
      xargs does not run the
      utility argument on empty input, but it supports the
      -r option for command-line compatibility with GNU
      xargs; but the -r option
      does nothing in the NetBSD version of
      xargs.-R
    replacements-I
      will do replacement in. If replacements is negative,
      the number of arguments in which to replace is unbounded.-S
    replsize-I can
      use for replacements. The default for replsize is
      255.-s
    sizeNULL terminators) and the current environment will
      be less than or equal to this number. The current default value for
      size is ARG_MAX - 4096.-t-xxargs to terminate immediately if a command
      line containing number arguments will not fit in the
      specified (or default) command line length.If utility is omitted, echo(1) is used.
Undefined behavior may occur if utility reads from the standard input.
The xargs utility exits immediately
    (without processing any further input) if a command line cannot be
    assembled, utility cannot be invoked, an invocation of
    utility is terminated by a signal, or an invocation of
    utility exits with a value of 255.
xargs exits with one of the following values:
xargs utility is expected to be
  IEEE Std 1003.2 (“POSIX.2”) compliant.
  The -J, -o,
  -P, -R, and
  -S options are non-standard
  FreeBSD extensions which may not be available on other
  operating systems.
xargs utility appeared in PWB UNIX 1.0. It made its
  first BSD appearance in the 4.3 Reno release.
The meaning of 123, 124, and 125 exit values and the
    -0 option were taken from GNU xargs.
E2BIG.
The xargs utility does not take multibyte
    characters into account when performing string comparisons for the
    -I and -J options, which may
    lead to incorrect results in some locales.
| December 21, 2010 | NetBSD 9.4 |