On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Michael Havens wrote:

> 	xargs reads the standard input and then runs a command by putting the
> 	lines read as the new command's command-line arguments.
>
> Isn't that what the pipe would do w/o the xargs command?

No.

xargs makes command-line arguments from the standard output.

Without xargs, the standard output becomes the standard input of the next
command.

See this simple example:

$ echo 1 2 3 | xargs cat
cat: 1: No such file or directory
cat: 2: No such file or directory
cat: 3: No such file or directory

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


 Jeremy C. Reed

 	  	 	 technical support & remote administration
	  	 	 http://www.pugetsoundtechnology.com/

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