z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command ... - Christian Grothoff

xargs
Example
If no command template appears on the command line, xargs uses echo by
default. When xargs runs a command, it uses your search rules to find the
command; this means that you can run shell scripts as well as normal programs.
The command you want to execute should be in your search $PATH.
xargs ends prematurely if it cannot run a constructed command or if an executed
command returns a nonzero status.
If an executed command is a shell program, it should explicitly contain an exit
command to avoid returning a nonzero by accident; see sh for details.
Other Options
You can use the following options with any of the three main options.
–E [eofstr]
Defines eofstr to represent end-of-file on stdin. For example:
–E :::
tells xargs that ::: represents the end of stdin, even if an input file
continues afterward. If there is no –E or –e option, a single underscore (_)
marks the end of the input.
In a doublebyte locale, eofstr may contain doublebyte characters.
–e [eofstr]
Acts like –E but the eofstr argument is optional. If you specify –e without
eofstr, there is no end-of-file marker string, and _ is taken literally instead of
as an end-of-file marker. xargs stops reading input when it reaches the
specified end-of-file marker or the true end of the file.
–p Prompts you before each command. This turns on the –t option so that you
see each constructed command before it is run. Then xargs displays ?...,
asking if you really want to run this command. If you type a string beginning
with y, xargs runs the command as displayed; otherwise, the command is
not run, and xargs constructs a new command.
–s size
Sets the maximum allowable size of an argument list to size characters
(where size is an integer). The value of size must be less than or equal to
the system variable LINE_MAX; if you omit the –s option, the default
allowable size of an argument list is LINE_MAX. The length of the argument
list is the length of the entire constructed command; this includes the length
of the command name, the length of each argument, plus one blank for
separating each item on the line.
–t Writes each constructed command to stderr just before running the
command.
–x Kills xargs if it creates a command that is longer than the size given by the
–s option (or {LINE_MAX} is –s was not specified). This option comes into
effect automatically if you specify –i or –l.
The following displays filenames in three columns:
ls | xargs –n 3 echo
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