Call a program one time for each argument w/ xargs

Generally, I've used xargs in combination with programs like kill or echo both of which accept a variable number of arguments. Some programs only accept one argument.

For lack of a better example, lets try adding 1 to 10 numbers. In shell environments you can add with the expr command.

> expr 1 + 1
2

I can combine this with seq and pass the piped values from seq to expr with xargs.

> seq 10 | xargs expr 1 + 
expr: syntax error

In the above, instead of adding 1 to 1 and then 1 to 2, it trys to run:

expr 1 + 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Syntax Error!

We can use the -n flag to ensure that only one argument is applied at time and the command runs 10 times.

> seq 10 | xargs -n1 expr 1 +
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

For more insight into what's being called, use the -t flag to see the commands.

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