Nice! I used to do something like this, which avoids xargs altogether:
cat urls.txt | while read url; do echo download $url; done
Nice! I used to do something like this, which avoids xargs altogether:
cat urls.txt | while read url; do echo download $url; done
You can also avoid cat since you aren't actually concatenating files (depending on file size this can be much faster):
while read -r url; do echo "download $url"; done < urls.txt
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 -r option for read command to preserve backslashes. I was using while loops before too, but wanted to have a compact single command replacement. And doing it with a while loop as an alias (or function) didn't work well, because the command has to be interpreted. xargs does 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 other while vs xargs. In a script, I prefer writing full while loops instead.
Vibe coded? You know how this works?
Good luck with that. I look forward to your future posts about it.
🤣
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