How can I pass all arguments with xargs in middle of command in linux

Question

I want to pass all the files as a single argument on Linux but I am not able to do that.

This is working

ls | sort -n | xargs  -i pdftk  {} cat outpu         


        

Answer 1

The most intuitive way I found was to:

• first construct the commands with -I{} and "echo",
• then execute the commands with "bash" (as if you are executing a shell script)

Here is an example to rename extensions from ".txt" to ".txt.json":

find .|grep txt$|xargs -I{} echo "mv {} {}.json"|bash

Slightly advanced example to rename .txt to .json (removing .txt extension)

find $PWD|grep txt$|cut -d"." -f1|xargs -I{} echo "mv {}.txt {}.json"|bash

I once had a requirement to append the string "End of File" to all files.

find .|grep txt|xargs -I{} echo "echo End of File >> {}"|bash

If you do it right, xargs is the king of all commands!

Answer 2

Use -I option:

echo prefix | xargs -I % echo % post

Output:

prefix post