The Joys of xargs
Moving Files
Juliet Kemp
Friday, August 29, 2008 11:06:46 AM
You can use xargs if you need to rename lots of files (e.g.
datestamping). This command will rename each file in the current
directory from filename.txt to 20080815-filename.txt:
ls | xargs -I {} mv {} 20080815-{}
This works because {} is a placeholder meaning "the current argument". (You
can use xxx or yyy or any other string instead of {} if you want, as well, and
it'll do exactly the same thing.) -I implies -n1, because
you want to act on each file individually.
Or you might want to move all the files in directory 1 into directory 2:
ls dir1 | xargs -I {} -t mv dir1/{} dir1/{}
Conclusion
I've concentrated here on using xargs to manipulate files in
various ways, but you can use the same tricks for other commands. For
example, if you have a file containing a list of IP addresses,
cat iplist | xargs -n1 nmap -sV
would run nmap on each IP address at a time. Play around with it a
bit and see what you can do!
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