On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Michael Havens wrote:

> 	find / -uid 9 -print > /tmp/uid.9
> 	cat /tmp/uid.9  | xargs chown news
>
> Which I think is telling the macine:
>
> 	search entire box for a file with a user id set to 9 and then to
> put the

>  	output into a file  called /tmp/uid.9
>
> then
>
> 	feed the output of cat into chown
>
> I have two questions about this:
> 1- Is my guess after reading the man pages correct?

Yes.

> 2- What is the use  of xargs?

It is very similar to that `backtick` command you learned recently.

xargs reads the standard input and then runs a command by putting the
lines read as the new command's command-line arguments.

I often use it to put multiple lines on one line (since it removes the
newlines) instead of using fmt.

By default xargs does echo.

rainier:~/work/invoices$ echo 1 2 3 | xargs
1 2 3
rainier:~/work/invoices$ echo 1 2 3 | xargs echo
1 2 3

Also:

echo `ls`
  is similar to
ls | xargs

Have fun ...

 Jeremy C. Reed

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