why would you ever pipe find into xargs instead of calling -exec?

    find -exec the '{}' iterated command ';'

▲ gumby 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Because xargs is faster. Exec will invoke the command once per matching file (which is sometimes what you want, of course)!

While xargs will accumulate a bunch of file names, then when it as n names will invoke the command with those names, while continuing to accumulate names until n is reached or the pipe closes.

The size of n depends on the system, but is usually at least a thousand.

▲ em-bee 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

the example as given does not accumulate, so that is what i worked with.

    find -exec command '{}' '+'

accumulates file arguments too. the only advantage of xargs is that you can tell it how many arguments to accumulate,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶x̶a̶r̶g̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶f̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶u̶m̶b̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶a̶s̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶.̶

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xorcist 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem with find is that you can't specify the maximum tolerated command line lengths, and find hasn't historically been very smart about it (it just had a compiled-in value). Apparently this is fixed in GNU find, but for older systems and other platforms that may still be an issue.

Another feature missing in find that xargs has is the maximum processes to start at a time. find will run the commands in sequence, but in many situations you really want to run a bunch in parallel.

	▲	em-bee 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		good points that i wasn't aware of, thank you. though personally i rarely start huge operations that need to be parallelized so i prefer simplicity over speed.

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unsnap_biceps 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

xargs will fit as many as it can in 128 KiB or the system limit, which is smaller, so in practice, it's almost always pretty similar default packing

	▲	em-bee 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		you are right, i forgot to check the default. fixed my comment.

▲ ggm 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The prior has a point because 98.89% of the time I type xargs -n 1 -0 and we are deep in the useless pipe argument which Rob Pike amongst others has rehearsed well.

I do it because I do it, just like why I use egrep and sed in pipes along with awk.

▲ t-3 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Leah Neukirchen's lr and xe are very nice as a find and xargs replacement (although lr's test flag is way too complex). lr *.file | xe -s ' ... ' is a really great pattern for iterative scripting and hard to get wrong.