Don't get me wrong; it's a perfectly good and useful tutorial. The meat comes at the end when you talk about parallelism and argument batching. That can make a world of difference when you're working on real-world problems, like moving millions of files (mv * won't work unless you're on a system without ARG_MAX, and even then there are performance implications).
I think a good intro to xargs starts with a list of things that you can't do without it. (Easy for me to say that, but of course I haven't written that piece...) It'd be great to know why to use it, not just how, you know what I mean?
Anyway, this is just off-the-cuff commentary, not criticism. Thanks for writing it up.
I think a good intro to xargs starts with a list of things that you can't do without it. (Easy for me to say that, but of course I haven't written that piece...) It'd be great to know why to use it, not just how, you know what I mean?
Anyway, this is just off-the-cuff commentary, not criticism. Thanks for writing it up.