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OSXFAQ Daily Unix Tricks   back to index

Week 49 - 'find' and 'xargs' (30 June 2003)

by Adrian Mayo - Senior Editor for Mac OS X Unix

Thursday - Too Many Files?

If 'find' finds many, many files, the resulting command line formed by 'xargs' may be too long. Limit this by using option '-n' which states the maximum number of parameters that 'xargs' will pass to the command (in this example to 'grep')

% find . -iname "*.ws" | xargs -n100 grep -il warning

...causes 'xargs' to call 'grep' once it has 100 filenames. If 350 filenames were found, 'xargs' would call 'grep' four times.


Discuss this trick in the Learning Center forum


If you want to learn more about Mac OS X Unix visit the Learning Center  click.

  • For beginners: the Mac OS X Unix Tutorial
  • For detailed information on specific topics: Mac OS X Advanced Unix
  • For answers to common problems: Mac OS X How To



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