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bashxargs

Piping echo output into xargs

I'm trying to pipe a list of values through xargs. Here's a simple example:

echo "Hello Hola Bonjour" | xargs -I _ echo _ Landon

I would expect this to output the following:

Hello Landon
Hola Landon
Bonjour Landon

Instead, the command outputs this:

Hello Hola Bonjour Landon

What am I missing?

Solution

  • Under -I, man xargs says

    unquoted blanks do not terminate input items; instead the separator is the newline character

    You can specify a different delimiter (at least in GNU xargs):

    printf 'Hello Hola Bonjour' | xargs -d' ' -I _ echo _ Landon

    More portably, use \0 as the delimiter and -0 to use it:

    printf '%s\0' Hello Hola Bonjour | xargs -0 -I _ echo _ Landon