1. The following command combines the output of the
parenthesized commands (minus the <apostrophe> characters)
onto one line, which is then appended to the file log. It
assumes that the expansion of "$0$*" does not include any
<apostrophe> or <newline> characters.
(logname; date; printf "'%s'\n$0 $*") | xargs -E "" >>log
2. The following command invokes diff with successive pairs of
arguments originally typed as command line arguments. It
assumes there are no embedded <newline> characters in the
elements of the original argument list.
printf "%s\n$@" | sed 's/[^[:alnum:]]/\\&/g' |
xargs -E "" -n 2 -x diff
3. In the following commands, the user is asked which files in
the current directory (excluding dotfiles) are to be
archived. The files are archived into arch; a, one at a time
or b, many at a time. The commands assume that no filenames
contain <blank>, <newline>, <backslash>, <apostrophe>, or
double-quote characters.
a. ls | xargs -E "" -p -L 1 ar -r arch
b. ls | xargs -E "" -p -L 1 | xargs -E "" ar -r arch
4. The following command invokes command1 one or more times with
multiple arguments, stopping if an invocation of command1 has
a non-zero exit status.
xargs -E "" sh -c 'command1 "$@" || exit 255' sh < xargs_input
5. On XSI-conformant systems, the following command moves all
files from directory $1 to directory $2, and echoes each move
command just before doing it. It assumes no filenames contain
<newline> characters and that neither $1 nor $2 contains the
sequence "{}".
ls -A "$1" | sed -e 's/"/"\\""/g' -e 's/.*/"&"/' |
xargs -E "" -I {} -t mv "$1"/{} "$2"/{}
