xargs question

reitzell · 06-04-2004, 11:52 AM

I'm doing something wrong with xargs. I had a bunch of rar files in a dir. and I can type unrar x file.rar and rebuild the archive. So, I thought I could ls *.rar|xargs unrar x and this would do the same thing but for all of the *.rar files I have but it doesn't work. Do you know what I'm doing wrong here?

Thanks,
Rob

Demonbane · 06-04-2004, 12:29 PM

yea, the problem is that rar/unrar doesn't take multiple input files as its arguments, so basically

Code:

ls *.rar|xargs unrar x

is equivalent to

Code:

unrar x *.rar

which won't work.
You can setup a simple loop to do it one by one, eg:

Code:

for foo in *.rar; do unrar x $foo; done

micxz · 06-04-2004, 12:29 PM

How about:

find . -name *.rar -print0 | xargs -0 unrar

reitzell · 06-04-2004, 02:50 PM

Thanks! Demonbane and micxz. This place rules!

(the "find ..." one doesn't work) but the for foo one does.

45t3r15k · 07-04-2004, 02:36 AM

try this
ls *.rar | xargs -i unrar x {}
Haven't tried it with the unrar command but I use this
ls *.wav | xargs -i lame {} {}.mp3
to encode a directory full of freshly ripped tracks to mp3 format