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Comment by bellaire | Hacker News Reader

Using xargs with a pipe is easier. I don't know any reason why I'd want to "save a pipe" when working at the command line.

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I think it was more about the appropriateness of the examples. z_'s comment is right-on, and I was going to post the same thing. It's a good intro, but the examples are contrived because you just don't need it.

It's not necessarily about saving a pipe, but also, when the tool provide first-class support for the function, it's typically less prone to error. For example, the -print0 becomes unnecessary, and I've been burnt by that.

I also appreciate the writeups that don't teach poor examples. We all know how prolific copy&paste coding is. How many times have you seen "grep foo bar | wc -l" when you know it's just all-around better to "grep -c foo bar"?

I felt bad using contrived examples, but I wanted a short post to cover the basics of xargs without getting detracted with discussions of the options of find. Based on the feedback I've seen here I'll go ahead and update the post though. If you can share some simple but less contrived examples please let me know, I'd love to update the post.

Don't get me wrong; it's a perfectly good and useful tutorial. The meat comes at the end when you talk about parallelism and argument batching. That can make a world of difference when you're working on real-world problems, like moving millions of files (mv * won't work unless you're on a system without ARG_MAX, and even then there are performance implications).

I think a good intro to xargs starts with a list of things that you can't do without it. (Easy for me to say that, but of course I haven't written that piece...) It'd be great to know why to use it, not just how, you know what I mean?

Anyway, this is just off-the-cuff commentary, not criticism. Thanks for writing it up.

I would prefer we only teach "grep -c" as a special case optimization to people who already understand how "grep | wc -l" works, because the latter is more generally useful.

I guess the question then becomes "why is xargs with a pipe easier?", or "why do you view xargs with a pipe as easier?".

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