Hello!

I am trying to feed results from a grep into an xargs statement, but it is not working:

The terminal gives me:

What am I doing wrong? Any help would be great!

Murdock

Hey Murdock. First, do you really need the grep? Is there some reason

ls *.wav

or some such thing wouldn't work?

Second, I don't know xargs off the top of the head well enough to know if this would help you, but you could also do something like

for file in `ls *.wav` ; do cp $file ../. ; done

Perhaps those flags to xargs are doing something else for you though beyond just passing the file name along?

I agree with discomurder: you don't really need egrep to create a list of *.wav files. Anyway the xargs command has too many options in your example. The following should work:
Two notes: 1) the -0 option is used when the input items are separated by a null string, which is not the case (unless you explicitly instruct egrep to terminate items with null, see option -Z). 2) you don't need to specify the newline character as delimiter since the shell takes care of it passing the output of egrep through the pipe: the newlines are actually removed in the passage.

Here's a simple command ... I know it by heart ... that I use to syntax check all of the Perl programs in a directory:

Notice the use of the "-I{}" construct, and the subsequent use of that placeholder in the command being executed. Also notice the "\;" construct: both are essential.

Use man xargs for an explanation of this voodoo.

Tip: It could be useful to include the word echo (in front of the word perl in the above example) so that, instead of executing the commands, it simply prints (echoes...) them to the console. (The "command to be executed" becomes echo.) This will let you see exactly what is going on... exactly what commands would have been executed.

Just an aside note: the \; part at the end of xargs is not necessary (and actually may trigger an error). Maybe you mixed the -exec option of find with the syntax of xargs.

Hello!

Thanks everyone for your help.

The reasons why I didn't want to just use *.wav is because I needed the flexibility of regular expressions.

Colucix: Both of your points are well taken. The -0 doesn't make sense, since the delimeter is newline. However, I still do not see why adding -d \n would actually make the statement not work.

Murdock

It would work if you put \n inside quotes, otherwise the shell interprets it as a literal "n" and since there is no "n" in the list of files, the whole list is passed as a single argument to xargs. You can better understand this if you do some test: