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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Nice! I used to do something like this, which avoids xargs altogether:
You can also avoid cat since you aren't actually concatenating files (depending on file size this can be much faster):
Usually this is the way. Once you enter xargs’ world, you lose access to your shell aliases, functions, and un-exported variables, which will often bite you in the ass.
You should use
-roption forreadcommand to preserve backslashes. I was usingwhileloops before too, but wanted to have a compact single command replacement. And doing it with awhileloop as an alias (or function) didn't work well, because the command has to be interpreted.xargsdoes exactly that, as it is designed for this kind of stuff. Other than having less stuff to type, I wonder if there are benefits from one over the otherwhilevsxargs. In a script, I prefer writing fullwhileloops instead.