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Are they any equivalent under OSX to the xargs -r under Linux ? I'm trying to find a way to interupt a pipe if there's no data.
For instance imagine you do the following:
touch test
cat test | xargs -r echo "content: "
That doesn't yield any result because xargs interrupts the pipe.
Is there either some hidden xargs option or something else to achieve the same result under OSX?
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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 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 command in UNIX or Linux is a powerful command used in conjunction with find and grep command in UNIX to divide a big list of arguments into small list received from standard input.
The xargs command is used in a UNIX shell to convert input from standard input into arguments to a command. In other words, through the use of xargs the output of a command is used as the input of another command. We use a pipe ( | ) to pass the output to xargs .
The POSIX standard for xargs mandates that the command be executed once, even if there are no arguments. This is a nuisance, which is why GNU xargs has the -r option. Unfortunately, neither BSD (MacOS X) nor the other mainstream Unix versions (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) support it.
If it is crucial to you, obtain and install GNU xargs somewhere that your environment will find it, without affecting the system (so don't replace /usr/bin/xargs unless you're a braver man than I am — but /usr/local/bin/xargs might be OK, or $HOME/bin/xargs, or …).
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