# zigford.org

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### Xargs tips

August 31, 2018 — Jesse Harris

After 12 years being a Windows admin, I've now used powershell more than other languages so I'm pretty fluent in it's syntax. So it makes me happy when I stumble upon bash/linux scripting paradigms which have been brought over to powershell.

It's great to see the inspiration powershell has gained from Unix systems and also great that it makes it easier for me to remember.

One paradigm I that I wished bash/*nix had is the `Foreach-Object` command. It makes working on collections of objects a breeze. I often find myself scratching my head when trying similar tasks on *nix. Enter `xargs`

Take this simple situation: I have a directory and I want to delete everything bar a single .config file.

            $ ls -a
            .   blog.css  .entry-23032.md      .footer.html  main.css
            ..  .config   .entry-23032.md.swp  .header.html  .title.html

My powershell brain wants to:

            $ gci | ? Name -ne '.config' | foreach-object { rm $_ }

On *nix, Xargs is a bit like adding pipeline input to rm

            $ ls -a | grep -v '\.config' | xargs rm

`xargs` is going to automatically append the output of the previous command as an argument of the rm command. In this case the argument has to be the final argument, but that can be changed using the `-I` parameter which specifies a substitue variable

            $ ls -a | grep -v '\.config' | xargs -I '{}' echo "Delete {} ?"

Of course the powershell line could be a bit shorter

            $ gci | ? Name -ne '\.config' | rm

If you have any comments or feedback, please email me and let me know if you will allow your feedback to be posted here.

Tags: bash-v-powershell, xargs, bash, powershell