Comments on: Escaping a pipe inside xargs http://www.andyd.net/2009/escaping-a-pipe-inside-xargs/ Andy Davidson's tech blog Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:49:31 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: andy http://www.andyd.net/2009/escaping-a-pipe-inside-xargs/comment-page-1/#comment-70 andy Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:22:59 +0000 http://www.andyd.net/?p=142#comment-70 Lots of people on twitter have pointed out that for loops would have led to the most readable format for this code - good suggestion ! Lots of people on twitter have pointed out that for loops would have led to the most readable format for this code – good suggestion !

]]> By: craiga http://www.andyd.net/2009/escaping-a-pipe-inside-xargs/comment-page-1/#comment-69 craiga Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:15:18 +0000 http://www.andyd.net/?p=142#comment-69 That way is fine. The | is a function of the shell, but xargs just execs the command you pass to it so escaping the pipes just makes the process think you're passing a | character on the command line. You can wrap the whole command line inside a shell by passing 'sh -c' to xargs instead of echo, like this: crazy | stuff | xargs -i {} sh -c "this {} | that {}" That doesn't really add anything to your current method, though, and you do get the benefit of being able to pipe to a file for sanity checks if you use echo. That way is fine. The | is a function of the shell, but xargs just execs the command you pass to it so escaping the pipes just makes the process think you’re passing a | character on the command line. You can wrap the whole command line inside a shell by passing ’sh -c’ to xargs instead of echo, like this:

crazy | stuff | xargs -i {} sh -c “this {} | that {}”

That doesn’t really add anything to your current method, though, and you do get the benefit of being able to pipe to a file for sanity checks if you use echo.

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