What is the difference between exec and xargs in unix

Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 4 months ago. Active 2 years, 8 months ago. Viewed 17k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. In addition to -0 , GNU xargs needs -r to avoid running the command if there's no input. Small example, two files a. Assume we didn't know that.

This post has opened my eyes to a new way of using find. Thanks a lot! What's the -exec way of doing xargs -P4 so that three of four cores don't stay idle?

Stephen Rauch 3, 14 14 gold badges 19 19 silver badges 32 32 bronze badges. Alexios Alexios If you use find xargs to execute each command separately -n1 you can also do that in parallel mode in order to boost performance. In this example I want to find PHP syntax errors in all php files in the current directory recursively.

Even though php -l fails and exits with 1 somewhere at the beginning, find -exec continues and finally exits with zero. The command immediately stops executing. Because the subcommand failed and this is the nature of piping commands. We can now see the main difference between find -exec and find xargs:. If you need to stop the execution on failed subcommands, you need to use xargs. The find command is used to find files in unix based systems.

The command is versatile in nature and provides you with a lot of options to work with this. The find command not only finds the files, but also allows you to take action on the files found. I am going to explain this with the help of a few examples.

Mat k 39 39 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Subhayan Bhattacharya Subhayan Bhattacharya 4, 4 4 gold badges 31 31 silver badges 47 47 bronze badges. Not quite a duplicate of Which is faster, 'find -exec' or 'find xargs -0'? More to the point: find -exec is pretty much identical to find -print0 xargs -0n1 since -n1 ensures one call per result.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Below is one major difference between xargs and exec: find. Adding -print will return the name of the file also, although in all little different way. Hope it helps. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook.