Xargs from a file

I've struggled with xargs conceptually for long time, but actually its pretty easy conceptually. For commands that don't read from stdin but do take arguments, like echo or kill, you can turn newline separated values from stdin in into arguments.

Piping to echo does not work.

> echo 123 | echo
# nothing

Using xargs it does.

> echo 123 | xargs echo
123

xargs can also read a file with the -a flag, turning each line of the file into an argument.

> echo "123\nabc" > test.txt
> cat test.txt
123
abc
> xargs -a test.txt echo
123 abc

H/T Brian Dunn

Tweet