In Programming By Stealth 152A Bart and I decided to hold off on the middle of the lesson he’d written up. That middle bit where he said to “put a pin in it” was about the use of xargs. I’m really glad we did skip it in the last installment. It’s a pretty useful concept and deserved a lot more attention than it would have if we’d tried to cram it into that episode. The other good news is that Bart learned a bit more about how xargs does its magic, so he is better able to explain it, and he updated the shownotes with a lot more detail and a great worked example.
As a teaser, the big problem xargs was designed to solve is that there are times when we want the data from the standard input stream (STDIN) to be passed to another command as one or more arguments.
You can find Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.
Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_07_08