Difference between using xargs and backticks

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hey all. Just a fast question, what is the technical difference between using back ticks and using xargs to perform a command?

Here's an example

Find /mydir -name *.conf |xargs rm

Vs

Rm 'find /mydir -name *.conf'

Is there a performance hit? I know they do the same thing but which is better to use in practice?

2

Of course xargs supports large filecounts, but putting that difference aside there would be extra overhead in loading and executing the xargs binary to start with, but this should be fairly minor unless your doing the same thing many times.

With GUN xargs you also get support for files with spaces in their names (via -0 parameter and -print0 in find). You can also suppress the run if the argument list is empty (via -r parameter).