A pipeline is a sequence of one or more commands separated by one of the control operators | or |&. The format for a pipeline is:

[time [-p]] [ ! ] command1 [ [|||&] command2 ... ]

The standard output of command1 is connected via a pipe to the standard input of command2. This connection is performed before any redirections specified by the command1(see REDIRECTION below). If |& is used, command1's standard error, in addition to its standard output, is connected to command2's standard input through the pipe; it is shorthand for 2>&1 |. This implicit redirection of the standard error to the standard output is performed after any redirections specified by command1.

The return status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command, unless the pipefail option is enabled. If pipefail is enabled, the pipeline's return status is the value of the last (rightmost) command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if all commands exit successfully. If the reserved word ! precedes a pipeline, the exit status of that pipeline is the logical negation of the exit status as described above. The shell waits for all commands in the pipeline to terminate before returning a value.

If the time reserved word precedes a pipeline, the elapsed as well as user and system time consumed by its execution are reported when the pipeline terminates. The -p option changes the output format to that specified by POSIX. When the shell is in posix mode, it does not recognize time as a reserved word if the next token begins with a `-'. The TIMEFORMAT variable may be set to a format string that specifies how the timing information should be displayed; see the description of TIMEFORMAT under Shell Variables below.

When the shell is in posix mode, time may be followed by a newline. In this case, the shell displays the total user and system time consumed by the shell and its children. The TIMEFORMAT variable may be used to specify the format of the time information.

Each command in a multi-command pipeline, where pipes are created, is executed in a subshell, which is a separate process. See COMMAND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT for a description of subshells and a subshell environment. If the lastpipe option is enabled using the shopt builtin (see the description of shopt below), the last element of a pipeline may be run by the shell process when job control is not active.

print lines that match patterns

-e PATTERNS**, --regexp=**PATTERNS

Use PATTERNS as the patterns. If this option is used multiple times or is combined with the -f (--file) option, search for all patterns given. This option can be used to protect a pattern beginning with “-”.

pattern-directed scanning and processing language

build and execute command lines from standard input

-I replace-str

Replace occurrences of replace-str in the initial-arguments with names read from standard input. Also, unquoted blanks do not terminate input items; instead the separator is the newline character. Implies -x and -L 1.

-P max-procs, --max-procs=max-procs

Run up to max-procs processes at a time; the default is 1. If max-procs is 0, xargs will run as many processes as possible at a time. Use the -n option or the -L option with -P; otherwise chances are that only one exec will be done. While xargs is running, you can send its process a SIGUSR1 signal to increase the number of commands to run simultaneously, or a SIGUSR2 to decrease the number. You cannot increase it above an implementation-defined limit (which is shown with --show-limits). You cannot decrease it below 1. xargs never terminates its commands; when asked to decrease, it merely waits for more than one existing command to terminate before starting another. xargs always waits for all child processes to exit before exiting itself (but see BUGS).

If you do not use the -P option, xargs will not handle the SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 signals, meaning that they will terminate the program (unless they were blocked in the parent process before xargs was started).

Please note that it is up to the called processes to properly manage parallel access to shared resources. For example, if more than one of them tries to print to stdout, the output will be produced in an indeterminate order (and very likely mixed up) unless the processes collaborate in some way to prevent this. Using some kind of locking scheme is one way to prevent such problems. In general, using a locking scheme will help ensure correct output but reduce performance. If you don't want to tolerate the performance difference, simply arrange for each process to produce a separate output file (or otherwise use separate resources).

-s max-chars, --max-chars=max-chars

Use at most max-chars characters per command line, including the command and initial-arguments and the terminating nulls at the ends of the argument strings. The largest allowed value is system-dependent, and is calculated as the argument length limit for exec, less the size of your environment, less 2048 bytes of headroom. If this value is more than 128 KiB, 128 KiB is used as the default value; otherwise, the default value is the maximum. 1 KiB is 1024 bytes. xargs automatically adapts to tighter constraints.