Frequent Question: What Does Xargs Do in Linux?

Xargs is a great command that reads streams of data from standard input, then generates and executes command lines; meaning it can take output of a command and passes it as argument of another command. If no command is specified, xargs executes echo by default.

What is the use of xargs command in Linux?

xargs (short for “eXtended ARGuments”) is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute commands from standard input. It converts input from standard input into arguments to a command.

What does xargs grep do?

Use xargs with the grep command to search for a string in the list of files provided by the find command. The example above searched for all the files with the . txt extension and piped them to xargs , which then executed the grep command on them.