Example of xargs' -x option in action

Posted by Ole Tange on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ole Tange
Published on 2010-06-12T01:22:37Z Indexed on 2010/06/12 1:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 190

Filed under:

shell

|

xargs

GNU xargs has option '-x'. The man page says:

-x Exit if the size (see the -s option) is exceeded.

But xargs seems to not care if -x is set or not. I have been unable to make an example in which the -x has any effect at all.

Please provide two examples in which the only difference is an added -x and that produce different output.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about shell

How to restrict the users' shell allowing to execute shell programs

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Is it possible to prevent any user to not use commands like ls, rm and other system commands which could harm the system. But the users should be able to execute shell programs. >>> More
Shell extension installation not recognized by Windows 7 64-bit shell

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a Copy Hook Handler shell extension that I'm trying to install on Windows 7 64-bit. The shell extension DLL is compiled in two separate versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. The DLL implements DLLRegisterServer which adds the necessary registry entries. After adding the registry entries… >>> More
Running shell commands without a shell window

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
With either subprocess.call or subprocess.Popen, executing a shell command makes a shell window quicky appear and disappear. How can I run the shell command without the shell window? >>> More
Why can't I reinstall MySQL?

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I've been looking all around the Internet for an answer but didn't find anything. I hope you can help me now. I have a server with MySQL. From one day to another, MySQL didn't let me enter with my root password anymore (accsess denied for user 'root'@'localhost' using password: 'YES'). So I tried… >>> More
Bash/shell script - shell output redirection inside a function

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
function grabSourceFile { cd /tmp/lmpsource wget $1 > $LOG baseName=$(basename $1) tar -xvf $baseName > $LOG cd $baseName } When I call this function The captured output is not going to the log file. The output redirection works fine until I call the… >>> More

Related posts about xargs

Make xargs execute the command once for each line of input

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
How can I make xargs execute the command exactly once for each line of input given? It's default behavior is to chunk the lines and execute the command once, passing multiple lines to each instance. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs: find /path -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm In… >>> More
Newline-separated xargs

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Is it possible to make xargs use only newline as separator? (in bash on Linux and OS X if that matters) I know -0 can be used, but it's PITA as not every command supports NUL-delimited output. >>> More
How can I use aliased commands with xargs?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have the following alias in my .aliases: alias gi grep -i and I want to look for foo case-insensitively in all the files that have the string bar in their name: find -name \*bar\* | xargs gi foo This is what I get: xargs: gi: No such file or directory Is there any way to use aliases in… >>> More
How do I execute find with GNU xargs to traverse a set of directories?

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
$ echo {a,b,c}.h d e.h |xargs -IA find A -name '*.h' find: `a.h b.h c.h d e.h': No such file or directory $ echo -e a.h\\nb.h c.h d e.h |xargs -IA find A -name '*.h' a.h find: `b.h c.h d e.h': No such file or directory The problem is that -I implies xargs will assume arguments are delimited by newline… >>> More
Sending the command(s) spawned by xargs to background

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I want to know how I can send the command(s) spawned by xargs to background. For example, consider find . -type f -mtime +7 | tee compressedP.list | xargs compress I tried find . -type f -mtime +7 | tee compressedP.list | xargs -i{} compress {} & .. and as unexpected, it seems to send… >>> More