[SunHELP] xargs ?

[Nicholas Dronen]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 08:50:53PM -0800, wyatt at draggoo.com wrote:

> One of the best uses I've found for xargs is for killing processes:
> # ps -ef | grep baduser | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -TERM

Leaving aside the matter of using p(kill|grep), you
can still shorten this pipeline:

In Bourne and Korn shells:

$ kill $(ps -ef | grep '[b]aduser] | awk '{ print $2 }')

In C shell (I think -- I stay as far away from it as I can):

% kill `ps -ef | grep '[b]aduser] | awk '{ print $2 }'`

You can also use xargs like:

$ xargs [ command ] < [ input file ]

which is similar to using a pipeline because
xargs reads from stdin in both cases.

Regards,

Nicholas Dronne