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Comment by noodly | Hacker News Reader

Comments are closed on that page, so instead I will comment here.

There's no need to use xargs, and pipe to sh in this scenario. The same functionality can be achieved by using only find:

  PROCS=8;cuffs=`which cufflinks`;find `pwd` -name 'accepted_hits.bam' -type f -exec qsub -l ncpus=$PROCS -- $cuffs -p $PROCS -o {}-cufflinks -g genes.gtf {} \;

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Creating a text stream which you then pipe to a shell is a good way of debugging complex operations, especially potentially destructive ones that may need inspection to verify. It's a technique I use a lot, to the point that some of my more destructive scripts don't do anything - they just output shell commands, and it's up to me to pipe them to the shell.

You can achieve this also by using find and its -ok option, instead of -exec, that way find will ask for confirmation before doing anything.

Thanks for the -ok option. was not aware -- but yeah, I've been a heavy user of -exec option for years, and it always blows my mind when people get crazy complicated xargs going.

That's not the same thing at all; I could emulate that in a script with 'read' and 'if', but that's not what I do.

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