Info Catalog find: Controlling Parallelism find: Multiple Files

find: Interspersing File Names

 
 3.3.2.6 Interspersing File Names
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 'xargs' can insert the name of the file it is processing between
 arguments you give for the command.  Unless you also give options to
 limit the command size (⇒Limiting Command Size), this mode of
 operation is equivalent to 'find -exec' (⇒Single File).
 
 '--replace[=REPLACE-STR]'
 '-I REPLACE-STR'
 '-i REPLACE-STR'
      Replace occurrences of REPLACE-STR in the initial arguments with
      names read from the input.  Also, unquoted blanks do not terminate
      arguments; instead, the input is split at newlines only.  For the
      '-i' option, if REPLACE-STR is omitted for '--replace' or '-i', it
      defaults to '{}' (like for 'find -exec').  Implies '-x' and '-l 1'.
      '-i' is deprecated in favour of '-I'.  As an example, to sort each
      file in the 'bills' directory, leaving the output in that file name
      with '.sorted' appended, you could do:
 
           find bills -type f | xargs -I XX sort -o XX.sorted XX
 
      The equivalent command using 'find -execdir' is:
 
           find bills -type f -execdir sort -o '{}.sorted' '{}' ';'
 
    When you use the '-I' option, each line read from the input is
 buffered internally.  This means that there is an upper limit on the
 length of input line that 'xargs' will accept when used with the '-I'
 option.  To work around this limitation, you can use the '-s' option to
 increase the amount of buffer space that xargs uses, and you can also
 use an extra invocation of xargs to ensure that very long lines do not
 occur.  For example:
 
      somecommand | xargs -s 50000 echo | xargs -I '{}' -s 100000 rm '{}'
 
    Here, the first invocation of 'xargs' has no input line length limit
 because it doesn't use the '-I' option.  The second invocation of
 'xargs' does have such a limit, but we have ensured that it never
 encounters a line which is longer than it can handle.
 
    This is not an ideal solution.  Instead, the '-I' option should not
 impose a line length limit (apart from any limit imposed by the
 operating system) and so one might consider this limitation to be a bug.
 A better solution would be to allow 'xargs -I' to automatically move to
 a larger value for the '-s' option when this is needed.
 
    This sort of problem doesn't occur with the output of 'find' because
 it emits just one filename per line.
 

Info Catalog find: Controlling Parallelism find: Multiple Files