However, there is no need to use ‘xargs’ with ‘find’ since ‘find’ has the -exec flag which does the same thing and doesn’t require a pipe.

That’s not actually true. In many simple cases, you can use -exec. However, depending on the number of items returned by find, and the action you’re taking, it can be a *lot* less efficient using -exec in comparison to xargs.

For example, say you are building a list of files to delete with find, and it is going to return 100k files. If you use find fpo/ -exec rm -rf '{}' \;, then you will be exec()’ing rm 100k times. If you use find foo/ -print | xargs rm -rf, then xargs will build the command argument list for rm to an appropriate length. For the sake of argument, say it runs rm with 1000 entries each time. That means you’re now only exec()’ing rm 100 times, instead of 100k times. When you’re dealing with large numbers like this, the time and CPU cycles to exec() your command that many times can have a very real performance impact.

Thanks for sharing with us.

Good article showing you 10 things to avoid when using the command line. To wit: Make directory trees in a single swipe. Change the path; do not move the archive. Combine your commands with control operators. Quote variables with caution. Use escape se…

I must agree with. It always good idea to use KISS philosophy.

Appreciate your post.

However, there is no need to use ‘xargs’ with ‘find’ since ‘find’ has the -exec flag which does the same thing and doesn’t require a pipe.