What's wrong with this xargs command?

Question

Consider the output:

% { echo one; echo two; echo three; } | xargs -I{} -L1 echo test-{} 
test-{} one
test-{} two
test-{} three

Why doesn't {} get substituted as per the manual page (and my memory, too)?

How to change the command line to get test-one, test-two, test-three lines as output?

Stéphane Gimenez · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-06 13:51:21Z

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Remove the -L 1; it is implied by -I (as the man page says), but it would override it when specified afterwards.

answered Mar 6 '12 at 13:51

Stéphane Gimenez
8,0521241

ddeimeke · Answer 2 · 2012-03-06 13:54:44Z

up vote 4 down vote

It works without "-L1", because it is implicitly set.

{ echo one; echo two; echo three; } | xargs -I{} echo test-{}
test-one
test-two
test-three

answered Mar 6 '12 at 13:54

ddeimeke
1,100210

Ole Tange · Answer 3 · 2012-05-09 20:32:37Z

If you have GNU Parallel http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ installed you can do this:

{ echo one; echo two; echo three; } | parallel echo test-{}

You can install GNU Parallel simply by:

wget http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/plain/src/parallel
chmod 755 parallel
cp parallel sem

3 Answers