xargs problem

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi

From the xargs man page (Solaris):
ls $1 | xargs -I {} -t mv $1/{} $2/{}

This would move all the files in directory $1 to directory $2

Problem 1:
In a shell script if I want to move files in d1 to d2
dir1=~/d1
dir2=~/d2
ls $dir1 | xargs -I {} -t mv $dir1/{} $dir2/{}

does not work......

Problem 2:
The idea is to move yesterday's file in dir1 to dir2
I have got all the yesterday's files in a variable called files
ls $files | xargs -I {} -t mv $dir1/{} $dir2/{}

produces - /usr/bin/ls -arg list too long

What am I missing???

Regards
enc.

2

For problem 1, the following works for me (under Linux)

ls -1 $dir1 | xargs -i -t mv $dir1/{} $dir2/{}

Should work in solaris too (-i and -I are equivalent - you don't need the {} after -i either as this is assumed as default).

When you say "does not work..." in what way does it not work, what error output is there, etc.

With Problem 2 - you are expanding the contents of "$files" which contains more filenames (i.e. arguments) than ls can handle (the sort of thing xargs was designed to combat!).

I think you'd be better off dropping the xargs approach altogether with this problem, and generate a file containing the list of filenames. Then just use a while loop to iterate through, e.g.

while read line
do
  mv $dir1/$line $dir2/$line
done < /my/list/of/files

Just my two pence though!

Cheers
ZB

3

Just tested the code for problem 2

Thanks once again :0

4

4.5 years later, still good :slight_smile: