On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 06:18:04PM +0000, Michael Havens wrote:
> I am going through this ebook and come to some lines:
> 
> 	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?

I hope you have done "man xargs" and studied the results

It invokes its arguments as a command and inital arguments with extra
arguments for the command are taken from the standard input.

For example if file foo contains three lines:
larry
moe
curly

and you do:
	xargs echo hello there <foo

xargs will execute the command:
	echo hello there larry moe curly

When you use find with xargs, you can run into trouble if any
of the filenames contain whitespace.  I would have written the
sample command above as:

 	find / -uid 9 -print0 | xargs -0 chown news

-print0 causes find to separate its output with nul (0) characters
instead of newlines.  -0 tells xargs that it's input is separated
by nuls instead of whitespace.

-Dale Farnsworth
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