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I want to know how I can send the command(s) spawned by xargs to background. For example, consider
find . -type f -mtime +7 | tee compressedP.list | xargs compress
I tried
find . -type f -mtime +7 | tee compressedP.list | xargs -i{} compress {} &
.. and as unexpected, it seems to send xargs to the background instead?
How do I make each instance of the compress command go to the background?
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The xargs command builds and executes commands provided through the standard input. It takes the input and converts it into a command argument for another command. This feature is particularly useful in file management, where xargs is used in combination with rm , cp , mkdir , and other similar commands.
xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is echo) one or more times with any initial-arguments followed by items read from standard input.
The -I option changes the way the new command lines are built. Instead of adding as many arguments as possible at a time, xargs will take one name at a time from its input, look for the given token ( {} here) and replace that with the name.
xargs is a Unix command used to build and execute commands from the standard input. You can combine it with other powerful Unix commands, such as grep , awk , etc., by using pipes. In simple terms, it passes the output of a command as the input of another. It works on most Unix-like operating systems.
Use the --max-procs / -P option to run xargs targets in the background. From the man page of GNU xargs version 4.2.27:
--max-procs=max-procs, -P max-procs
Run up to max-procs processes at a time; the default is 1. If max-procs is 0, xargs will run as many processes as possible at a time. Use the -n option with -P; otherwise chances are that only one exec will be done.
(You may want to combine this with -n 1 to makes sure that there is a new process for each file you want to compress)
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