xargs cheatsheet

xargs.sh

# turn a find or cut (cut delimiter, get first column) output into a list
/etc find . -name "*bash*" | xargs
cut -d, -f1 file.csv | xargs

# find a file and grep for a word in the file
find . -name "*.java" | xargs grep "Stock"

# handeling filenames which have WHITESPACE
ls *txt | xargs  -d '\n' grep "cost"

# find file and remove it, command is different if there is white space present in filename
find . -name "*m1.java" | xarg rm
find /tmp -name "*m 1.java" -print0 | xargs -0 rm 

# move files with multiple different extensions to the home dir 
find . -name '*bed' -o -name '*txt' -print0 | xargs -r0 mv -t ~/

# count lines of all text files in the cwd
ls -1 *.txt | xargs wc -l

# rename files to append .old on the end of the filename (-I allows {} to represents each file outputed from ls command)
ls *old | xargs -I {} mv {} {}.old

# find fastQ files in sub dirs, sort and pair them (helpful for pairing pair-end fastqs on the same line, which can be piped into trim_galore etc.)
find ~/fastq/*/* -name '*.fastq.gz' | sort | xargs -n2